echo in the echoing wood
by Kirinin
Summary: The nogitsune's experiment in humanity hits a snag: Derek Hale.
1. I of V

WARNINGS/TRIGGERS: suicidal ideation, psychological manipulation

* * *

It opens its eyes to blackness.

There is rough stone at his back, and when his fingers scramble for purchase, it can tell that the floor is some kind of stone, too –

(_Sedimentary. Clastic, the only kind of rock not composed of crystals, but fragments of other rocks that have been shattered and fused together_. Clast,_ Latin, broken. Also in 'iconoclast', the destruction of religious icons at a time of great change. An iconoclast, a person who challenges the status quo.)_

It shakes his head, pressing palm to temple, before the word _Byzantine _can take shape behind his eyes (_and all of its attendant connections_) and it seems to work, re-orienting him. Stiles Stilinski is nothing if not a font of useless knowledge, pictures pinned to the walls of his mind and pulled taut together with arteries of red string.

It's why the nogitsune likes his new home _so much._

The cave – it is a cave, he thinks – is less comfortable. This body is weak and trembling (_147 pounds of pale skin and fragile bone)_ and it feels _cold_ and dampish and acutely uncomfortable. Its left side is trembling and vibrating in a way that is really, really worrying, until his human mind supplies that it's blood loss to the area (_pins and needles)_, from lying on his side for who-knows-how-long on a slab of hard, cold stone.

Sniffing the air gets it nothing: it smells like metal and rock and a little like mold, the stench of rotten, damp things. It isn't familiar from any of Stiles's jaunts into the woods, although he must be close to Stiles's old haunts because where else in Beacon Hills has enough wide open space to house a cave? Except maybe he isn't in Beacon Hills? He has _no idea where he is._

It's awesome. It's the _best_.

Then it gets _even better_ when Derek Hale waltzes into view, the darkness drawing away from him like a blanket pulling back from his cheekbones, his clavicle, his shoulders, the cleft in his chin. This body doesn't have werewolf hearing or sense of smell; Hale could've been there all along. In fact, it's likely, because Stiles sees no way in or out, although there must be one somewhere. Unless werewolves have cultivated teleportation skills, which would also be awesome.

"This is fantastic," he enthuses. "Really. I'm impressed. Did you do this all yourself? Big bad Alpha, trapping Little Red…"

Derek narrows his eyes. This is something that Stiles never liked about the werewolf: he doesn't betray much. His face has a flatness that only disappears when he laughs, and the human Stiles has only seen that twice, _ever_. "You sound like him," Derek says, eventually.

It's unpredictable and strange as opening gambits go, which means his stomach does a little flip of startled delight, like a bird swooping for prey. "Well, yeah, sure," he says, spreading his hands out before him. "Wouldn't be much use if I didn't, right?" It occurs to him to look straight up for the first time, and when he does: wow. There's an opening up above – _high_ up above – and there are no handholds. The sides of the aperture have been smoothed by werewolf claws. He jumps up and tries them, just in case, but his blunted human fingers slide right off and he lands, hard, on his ass.

"Here," Hale says, and tosses something shining and cylindrical through the air.

He catches it one-handed: a bottle of water. "Thanks," he says, looking up at Hale a little sideways, out of the corner of one eye.

"So you do have manners," Hale says.

"When I want them," he replies. His eyes skim the opening up through the earth, but it's too dark to examine very closely. "When they make things more interesting, or are in the best interests of survival. And I'd like to survive. I'd like it very much."

"Tears won't work on me like they did on Melissa," Hale warns him.

"Friendly advice," the nogitsune says. "Tell me more. Tell me what you want, because it isn't to kill me." He grins. "Who could hurt this face?"

"Why you picked it," Hale says.

"That's right," he says, satisfied. "That, and…"

"…and?"

He examines Hale in the low light. Somehow, no matter where Hale stands, the thin light seems to illuminate his gaze. It gives the impression of a floating pair of eyes in the dark, a trick of the light meant to intimidate. But he feels generous. Hale has surprised him, and surprise is… just _fantastic_.

So, "…and because of his brain," he says, wandering around the cave and trailing his fingers around the edges of the prison. He doesn't look back at Derek as he goes: there's no need to keep something that isn't a danger in his sights, and meanwhile it must exasperate the wolf how little he smells of fear, how little he looks like it.

"Stiles's brain," Derek says, "going in a million different directions at once."

He's getting tired of talking to Hale, who seems content to observe him and make self-evident commentary. He looks at the water bottle and untwists the cap. Briefly considers refusing to drink from it, to die of thirst while Hale watches, but he's still curious, so he takes a large swallow, and some of the tension inside his stupid, human body eases. "So why am I down in the dirt? Wondering if Stiles is still in here?" He taps at his temple with a furious energy – so much in this form, it's a high, almost – and grins, lopsided. "I'm not sure what would cause you more pain, to say he _is_ here or to say he isn't. If I say he _is_ – then he's suffering, isn't he? Because he _would_ suffer. His heart would break if he could remember everything I've done. But at the very least, there's still hope.

"If, on the other hand," he says, striding in the other direction, "I tell you he isn't… your friend is dead. You can mourn him, but only after you've killed a creature with his face. That has to _hurt_, doesn't it? What to choose…"

"The truth?" Hale suggests.

The nogitsune looks up with a grin, and shakes his head from side to side, his finger up and down at Derek Hale. "Wow, that's optimistic for _you_, Sourwolf." The thought of optimism brings a flash of shy smile to Stiles's eidetic brain. "Where is Scott, anyhow?"

Hale tilts his head to one side. "Scott couldn't handle you right now."

He approaches the werewolf, making sure his eyes are at their emptiest. "Handle me?" he says, smile twitching. Hale draws back a hair, and that makes something in this body sing. (_Adrenaline, noradrenaline. Dopamine, serotonin. A rush._) "I'm a nogitsune. No one can handle me."

Hale reaches out and snags his hoodie, drawing him close.

He looks down at the hand, gives a mental shrug at its presence. He thinks he does something with his chin, too – a slight tilt of disinterest – that seems to come naturally to this body. (_Muscle memory. The pathways used for motor memory are separate from the medial temporal lobe pathways used for declarative memory. Rather, declarative memory is concerned with facts that can be recalled. It can be further divided into episodic memory, concerned with personal experiences; and semantic memory, concerned with pure data.)_

"I can handle you just fine," Derek says. His features don't wolf out. They look flat, disaffected as ever, but then there's a flash of pity.

"Feel sorry for him?" the nogitsune says.

"I do," Derek says. "My family was my identity. I know what it's like to have that stripped away."

They're still very close. He tries to take in Hale's face, but he can't see all of it at once, and it's closed off again anyway, bolts sliding home. "I'll bet they screamed," the nogitsune says, reaching out to squeeze Derek's shoulder, because, after all, if they're gonna be this close he's going to go full-on Stiles-bonhomie. Because it hurts them _more_. "How do a bunch of full-on werewolves let themselves get trapped in their own basement and not, like, knock down a wall, or jump through the flames or _anything_? Your family must've been really, really slow, huh?" He makes sure his expression looks empathetic: easy to do with these eyes, this mouth. "But take heart. It's nature at its finest, weeding out the weak. Although maybe it wasn't working for your family, huh, if _you're_ the survivor. Since you can't even keep a bunch of teenagers from destroying themselves." He keeps his hand on Derek's shoulder and gestures with the other towards himself, towards Stiles Stilinski, just a little shell, just a pretty covering, just the wrapping paper around the sharp, splintered shrapnel inside. "After all, look what became of me."

Derek huffs a breath. He removes his hand from Stiles's hoodie and moves it to the side of the nogitsune's neck, mirroring. He squeezes, as though the nogitsune is the one who is in need of comfort. The nogitsune feels something in its chest turn over, and involuntary reaction has him blinking several times in a row in surprise.

It's not frustration, yet. He knows humans find it frustrating not to understand everything right away. But for the nogitsune, it still smacks of novelty, and he's so _bored_ that for a moment he doesn't struggle.

It must be the boredom, because there's this moment when he doesn't question Hale's motives at all, just sways in the direction of the touch, and his mind is… quiet.

The nogitsune _should_ be wary because this is clearly a trick. Instead, it's as though the touch has given him permission to feel Stiles's exhaustion for the first time, the way that this body hasn't slept in _weeks_. His heart rate picks up; his respiratory rate increases, and the muscles around his throat constrict and expand unpredictably. The cave tilts, vision narrows. Stiles's memories are a buzzing, insistent, babbling litany in his ear, but he can't can't can't listen, the cave is so small and Derek is everywhere, all in his space, in his air. Suddenly, it comes to him: there's a contact poison, there's kanima venom in Derek's hand. But when Derek moves it, allowing the nogitsune to scrabble back, it grows worse. The heart rate is up again, more, and he's – this fragile human body – he's having a heart attack – he's going to die.

That seems to jolt him out of it. That or Hale again, kneeling in front of him and saying his name over and over.

"Stiles. Stiles. It's a panic attack."

"No," he says, _because that is impossible._

"It is," Hale replies. "Drink the water."

"It's in the water – you gave me something. It's in your hands, your hands have something on them –"

"No," Hale says, hands spread wide. "No, it's just water." There's a distinct pause. "Here."

The nogitsune catches a small, plastic container that rattles in his palm. When he opens it, he realizes it's his Adderall.

"Oh thank God," he says, tapping a pill onto his palm and swallowing it with a gulp of the water. "I go out of my mind without these." An instant later, he realizes the humor in this and begins to laugh. "Ha, right, I'm not even in my own mind right now!"

Is that Stiles or him? Because he knows Stiles is still there. Or at least, the facts he knows, (_his semantic memory_) because Stiles's brain won't stop spitting them out at random. This is what it is to have ADHD and insomnia and an internet connection. He has memories of hunting through Wikipedia until three AM for three schoolnights in a row because he started thinking about circumcision and wondered _who the fuck thinks that's a good idea_? And then gave the resultant paper to Coach because history sucked that year, they had Miller who put a A- at the top of everyone's paper and never read a word, and also because Stiles was –

Stiles was a trickster demon in his own right. That's exactly why the nogitsune wanted him. He'd liked giving Stiles puzzles to solve: the riddles, the schoolbus. Stiles was _good_ at them, he was so much _fun_, and now he's gone, and the nogitsune wishes he was still around to play with.

The nogitsune always breaks its toys in the end.

After that, Derek doesn't approach him again. The nogitsune believes it may die of boredom, but it falls asleep before it gets the chance.

* * *

Adderall is _awesome_.

When he wakes up, he feels _super-_energized, _super-_focused. He feels so good, so rejuvenated, that he takes another. And then he feels like moving!

He does. He paces. It's morning, Sourwolf nowhere to be found. Which means there's a way out, right? Right!

But that could be straight up for a werewolf, he decides, examining the wall for handholds in the light of day. It's really pretty impressive. Although there's enough roughness for the nogitsune to confirm his suspicion that the opening was made with werewolf claws – _multiple _werewolves' claws, judging from the variable width, (_Lydia would love to measure the difference, probably, sounds like something she would do, totally, she'd have a pair of calipers and everything_) there still aren't enough handholds for Stiles-shaped hands, nosir. It's possible, totally possible, that if he were into freeclimbing he could do it – but not with the crappy handholds he's got and no training on how to use them. He gives it a go, because he can do anything! He is awesome! However, as it turns out, he is not quite awesome enough to press his fingers into millimeter-width cracks or to cut chunks out of stone with his 147-pound weakling levels of badassery.

This daunts him for a while, but not for more than a few minutes of frustrated pacing. (_Hynes and Doty, in _Mythical Trickster Figures_ (1997) state that every trickster has several of the following six traits: _

_1) fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous_

_2) deceiver and trick-player_

_3) shape-shifter_

_4) situation-inverter_

_5) messenger and imitator of the gods_

_6) bricoleur)_

_Bricoleur_, a word that Stiles Stilinski had looked up immediately on reading it for the first time, means that you assemble things out of no-things, the way he'd made a bomb out of nails, nuts, bolts, a few wires, some chemistry room thefts, and wrapping paper that he'd bought for Coach's gift.

So, what does he have?

The cave is swept free of _anything_ useful. Its floor is constructed of stone, and stone only. There is _one_ stray rock someone has missed; the nogitsune pockets it.

He has Stiles's hoodie. He removes the strings and contemplates them. Then stuffs them in his pocket.

The Adderall bottle. The pills themselves. The water bottle.

Huh. Could he poison Derek Hale?

Probably. What good would it do? He might get to feed off of Derek's suffering – briefly – but a hyped-up, Adderall'd Derek Hale wouldn't get him out of this mess. If anything, Derek might shake him around a little for his trouble.

Perhaps he could fashion the stone into some kind of weapon. Could he manage to swallow it? If he could swallow it, he would be rushed off to Melissa and safety, and damn the consequences. The very fact that he is still alive down here says that they mean to keep him. Cure him?

Gosh, they sure are persistent!

The stone is too big to swallow, so that's out. But maybe… wow, maybe that was too much Adderall, because his thoughts are flying around like…

_Too much Adderall._

The bottle of pills gleams beckoningly in the low light.

At first, he's tempted to tip the whole bottle in his mouth: see how Sourwolf likes _that_. But that could be overdoing it (_toxic symptoms from taking an overdose of Adderall can come at low doses)_ and the nogitsune likes Stiles's brain, the twisting circuitous cleverness of it, like a Mobius strip with one, razor-sharp edge, and he wants to _keep it._ If he overdoses, he's out of a body and Stiles is dead and the game is over. He likes the game to be tilted in his favor; it's fun, it's a rush. But he likes it even better when he can feel the people around him _learning_, growing, getting bigger and better and faster because of him, offering him a real challenge. If he stretches out the game, this could grow to be his favoritest _ever_.

Stiles Stilinski looked up overdose information on Adderall; of course he did, he's Stiles Stilinski, and he was taking the stuff, and if that wasn't enough, the stray thoughts he hears now confirm it. The nogitsune just has to access it. _Stiles_, he tries. _Stiles, come on. Come out and play again. I won't bite. Promise?_

But there's nothing, no conscious response at all, and the nogitsune feels a stab of panic; breathes through it, because the panic attack the day before is _not_ something it wants to experience again.

_Stiles. Adderall. Come on. You don't want us to take too many, do you?_

A storm of emotion comes from deep within Stiles Stilinski's body, rising up within him like a tsunami of grief and fear and horror, and the nogitsune should be thrilled, should be _feeding_, but this isn't someone else's distress, confusion, or chaos: it's coming from inside his own body, and it's making _his_ heartbeat accelerate, and _his_ vision grow dim, and inciting him to want, _need_ to leave, to run, because of all the (_adrenaline_) prey-fear in his body telling him he has to _leave_, telling him fight-or-flight, but there's neither, here, neither, and –

_(TAKE THEM ALL.)_

The nogitsune stares at the pill bottle in his hands; he watches his hands. The left hand holds the bottle, firmly. The right, pushes down and turns, and the top pops off and lands on the floor. He's opened the bottle without thinking about it.

Hasn't he?

_(TAKE THEM ALL.)_

The pills shake out into his hand. There are eight of them. Eight at fifteen milligrams each, which is, is that fatal?

_(TAKE THEM ALL.)_

Eight times fifteen, eight times fifteen. Why can't he do that in his head? It should be easy, but he's too focused on the way that his hand is lifting up to his mouth, inch at a time. This can't be happening. Stiles can't be this strong, still. He hasn't heard a peep from him in what seems like forever. Not one, conscious word, choice, _emotion_, and he's all up in the nogitsune's face all of a sudden –

He feels a sharp sensation in the meat of his palm and the pills go flying. Derek Hale is standing in front of him, breathing heavily.

For once, the nogitsune has no words. He stares at Hale as if he fell out of the sky, which – he kind of did do.

"How many did you take?" Hale demands, grabbing him by the shoulders. "How many, Stiles?"

"Two," the nogitsune says. "Two, two, stop shaking me!"

"You were gonna take them _all_, of course I'm shaking you!"

The nogitsune looks into Hale's face. He looks about as terrified as the nogitsune feels. But there's nothing to say. "I'd do it again," is what comes out.

Hale has dropped to all fours and is hunting down each pill. "How many were in your hand?"

"Eight times fifteen," he says, which makes _no sense at all._ Just saying there had been nine would have been enough to make Hale hunt the ground on all fours for hours. Saying there had been far fewer could make Hale stop hunting. Then, the nogitsune could have gathered the hidden extras for later use. Or, if Hale found them, it would be confirming the nogitsune's status as unworthy of trust, which, hardly necessary, right? But still good for screwing with Hale.

"I want you to have the pills. I don't want you to have to go through withdrawal on top of everything else," Hale mutters. "I'll bring it to you every day."

"I'll hide it every day," he blurts. "I'll save them up." His face – he can feel it getting hotter and hotter. Is this what _blushing_ feels like? It's miserable – he can tell his shame is painted across his face.

It's the Adderall's fault. He's blurting the first thing on his mind. He can't seem to stop.

Hale is close, and again, some stray stream of light just seems to _find his eyes_, and the nogitsune can't look away. "Don't do that. Don't do that," Hale says, helplessly.

The nogitsune shakes his head, side-to-side, and then Derek Hale is clasping him, tight.

He feels the pressure of Hale's arms, and that pressure makes him feel safe (_serotonin; oxytocin; dopamine; acceptance: the molecules of Pack)_ and there's a _smell_, a familiar smell that makes him bury his nose at Derek's shoulder, even though his own arms stay flat at his sides.

He can do it, this – this human hugging thing. He did it with Sheriff Stilinski – he did it with Scott McCall. He gave Scott a pretty special one, if he did say so, himself, pulling Scott so close to this body that it seemed they were two asymmetrical halves of some piece of modern art that would fall apart if separated to stand alone. But maybe the Adderall is making his behavior more honest than usual, too, because this time he can't wriggle away or press Derek in return. He can only stand there like the shell he is, holding the rotten meat inside.

Derek's hand moves to the back of his head, and the nogitsune realizes a moment later that he is saying something into the fabric of Derek's shirt.

This body talks a lot. (_Muscle memory.) _And sometimes it doesn't even know it's talking. Sometimes he doesn't know if he's talking aloud or just thinking, and suddenly he feels shaky. The aftermath of the glow of Adderall super-focus seems to be depressive anxiety. His mood has plummeted. He thinks longingly of those hours spent awash in a glow of confident, productive energy, when ODing on Adderall had seemed a brave and genius move and not _ugly death_, which is what it likely would have been.

Hale draws back, examining his face.

"Stoppit," he orders. "I'm not –"

"You are," Hale says.

"I'm not," the nogitsune replies.

"You don't even know what I'm going to say."

He eyes Derek. "I'm not Stiles Stilinski," he says, harsh. His voice sounds like stone-on-stone.

Derek eyes him up and down, and the nogitsune throws his hands down in despair.

"I _look_ like him and _sound_ like him," he says, exasperated. Finally out of patience with this slow, surly human who _just won't get it._ "But your friend is gone. Let me go," he says. "Let me go and I won't torture you anymore. Promise, swear, on blood, on whatever you like. I'll leave here. I won't harm you or yours. I'm so _bored_ here, Sourwolf. _So. Bored._"

Derek reaches forward and rests his palm at that juncture of neck and shoulder and, like it's some magic spell, the nogitsune feels itself teeter on the verge of relaxation.

But it's such a long, _long_ way down. Last time he relaxed, it caused a panic attack, as paradoxical as that sounds, and this stupid human body is so fucking _nonsense_.

It's the _worst_.

He jerks back.

"Here," Derek says, and his expression barely shifts. "I brought you a sandwich."

The nogitsune examines it carefully. "Are you still trying to please him? Hot ham and cheese is his favorite, right?"

"It's simple biology," Derek replies. "It's what you like because it's what this body can digest best and get the most nutrients. See if it tastes good to you."

He takes a bite of ham and cheese and bread and closes his eyes. "Oh my god," he says. "I'm – I'm really so _hungry_. I barely let him eat."

"I know," Derek says. "Eat your sandwich."

The next day, Derek brings a collection of poetry, and reads in the corner across from the nogitsune. He's brought a reading light so that, even in the dim light of the hole above them, he doesn't have to shift around to find the best spot. He seems to find Stiles's slender, failing body to be no threat at all, if the way that he buries himself inside the book is any indication.

"Poetry, Sourwolf? Figures a sour wolf like you would read poetry."

"Did Stiles ever read poetry?" Derek wonders aloud, and since it's the first thing that Hale has spoken since he arrived, the nogitsune deigns to answer him.

"Stiles read everything he could get his hands on," is the reply, with sharp-toothed grin. "But he didn't like poems."

There is another long silence. Derek turns a page.

Down here with no sensory stimulation of, like, _any kind_, the nogitsune's senses are even more acute than usual. He can _smell_ the woody pulp of the paper, taste the astringent tang of tannins on his tongue. _Wants_ the knowledge on the page.

He tries to snatch the book away from Hale; but Hale hangs onto it, and it rips in two in an instant.

Derek seems shocked; the nogitsune can't help but laugh, falling backwards and banging his head against the other side of the cave, but he's laughing and exclaiming and holding his head.

Hale quietly reclaims the half that the nogitsune stole and presses the two parts together, looking puzzled, and the nogitsune is taken aback all over again. Even Hale isn't so stupid as to think that pressing the book together with his hands can really reunite two halves to make a whole, so the frown on his face and the puzzlement in his eyes are symbolic. Is he hoping to make Stiles Stilinski whole?

After a moment, Hale sets the first half of the book aside; he must have been nearly done with it anyway. And when the nogitsune lunges forward again, Hale easily presses him out of the way by the simple expedient of holding the top of Stiles's head. "What are you _doing_?" Hale growls, as though he is a recalcitrant wolf cub and not a demon sent to torment he and his, and something in the nogitsune breaks, and it laughs again.

"Listen," he says. "My kind weren't meant to be in captivity. I'll go Peter-Hale-crazy on your ass. If you think that Kate Argent was a blight on your family, wait until I get out of here. I'll make her look like a fucking girl scout, I swear to God."

Derek blinks slowly in the face of this rage, and then his lips press together and those lips and a squintiness in the eyes makes his face form an honest-to-goodness real _expression_.

Stiles Stilinski would be _proud_.

"Here's the thing," Derek says, "and listen, because I don't think you've considered this. My life's already been ruined."

The nogitsune blinks.

"And Scott's. And Allison's. And your father's, too. Do you think you can do worse than making someone with their best friend's face betray them? Watch him slip away, replaced by something bloodthirsty and inhuman? Killing Scott or Mr Stilinski would have been a mercy, the way you made them feel."

There is something large and dry lodged in the nogitsune's throat. "Then what am I _doing_ here? Why aren't I dead?"

Derek shakes his head. "You still don't get it. If we can't save you, we're powerless in this world. We'll die before we give up. All of us."

"I don't see any of them down here," the nogitsune says, quiet. "Just you."

"Who did you want to see?"

"Scott," he says. The name falls off his tongue – muscle memory again, because he's pretty sure he didn't think of advantages or disadvantages when he said it: just a weird longing to see that face, with a jaw that's a little lopsided and eyes that are very earnest.

Derek sighs. "Soon. Come here," he says.

The nogitsune scoots backward until he is sitting a few feet away from Hale, and Hale reads him all of the poetry from the section on wildness. The nogitsune can't help but giggle at the sound of Derek Hale's voice reciting _Crazy Dog Events_ in his flattest, matter-of-fact-est voice, until he gets to the last verse:

_4. Paint yourself white, mount a white horse, cover its eyes & make it jump down a steep and rocky bank, until both of you are crushed._

The nogitsune shivers. He is the horse and Derek Hale is the crazy dog riding on his back down, down, until they are both crushed to pieces.

* * *

A/N: Cross-posted to ao3; feel free to read or review there as well as here. :)

Reviews are helpful! Read? Review! :D

-K


	2. II of V

The nogitsune feels filthy. He'd like a shower.

He'd also like a toilet that flushes instead of a hole in the floor, but one can't have everything.

As if Hale can read his thoughts, he's down the next day with fresh clothing, toilet paper, soap, a toothbrush, enough water so that the nogitsune can at least rinse himself, and one, blue-and-white capsule.

"What's that?" says the nogitsune.

"Your Adderall," Hale replies.

"Mine's orange-colored."

"It's a capsule, not a pill," Derek replies. "It's still fifteen milligrams. Look: it says on the side."

The nogitsune examines the pill from every angle. It _smells_ like Adderall, plus the starchy-sweet smell of gelatin. When he unscrews the capsule and flicks his tongue out to tastes its insides, it tastes like Adderall does when he lets it sit too long on his tongue: bitter and unpleasant, leaving a characteristic, tingling numbness in its wake. He hands both halves back to Hale face-up, full of powder.

Derek unscrews the top off of a bottle of water. Then, he takes one of the pill-halves from the nogitsune, upends it into the bottle, and taps its sides until the powder stops clinging to the shiny, gelatin edges. He caps the bottle and shakes it vigorously for a moment, then hands it back.

"Thank you," says the nogitsune. He squints at Hale, suddenly struck by the enormity of it all. Hale and his Pack created this bolt-hole. Hale has been feeding, medicating, washing, and watering the body of Stiles Stilinski like someone who keeps giving a plant fertilizer pellets and water because they're too clueless to realize it's withered and rotten at the root. Even the trickster can't find that funny, someone caring for something that can't ever thrive, can't even be _real_, ever again. It's plodding and boring – and _sad_ and _pathetic_ – but not funny at all. It's _useless_ is what it is.

Nevertheless, he turns away from Hale not out of human modesty but because he can't stand to look at his face anymore, and strips. The filthy clothing goes in a pile, and he dumps an entire bottle of water over his head right away. It feels _good_. Hale has brought soap, if not shampoo; he gets up a good lather in his hair and pours another bottle over it, and the soap washes over his shoulders and arms, rinsing away the first layer of filth. He scrubs the rest of himself quickly, efficiently. A third bottle of water is carefully rationed to rinse each limb, genitals, underarms, back, ass.

Hale hands him a towel and he feels – _human again_ was the phrase he was going to use, but it's not appropriate.

Next is clothing. Derek hands him boxer shorts, an old pair of jeans, Stiles's favorites, that are soft and drape over his hands like silk, a second, dark purple hoodie, a pair of socks, sneakers minus laces. The second hoodie is minus laces, too. _Wow with the thorough_, the nogitsune thinks, but Derek has learned just how close he is to doing something drastic. And this is just what he was thinking of when he was first trapped here a week or so ago, that a partner who learned fast made a more exciting game, but this is unlike any game the nogitsune has ever played before. He feels as though he is off the board entirely, or else playing a version with insane, local rules.

And to punctuate that, Hale smiles at him now that he's clean, glances down at his still-bare feet – but most of the floor is wet, now, and _wet socks_ _are gross_ no matter where you're from or who you are – and slides into his space like he belongs there. "How are you?" he says.

"I'm going crazy. There's nothing to _do_," the nogitsune replies, but very soft, which is ridiculous because they're not close enough for whispering, but something about the situation makes him feel like he should speak in a hush.

Perhaps this instinct is correct, because his hushed voice is rewarded a moment later: Hale sidles closer, and that hand goes right where the neck and shoulder meet, that most helpless and exposed place where the veins and arteries run just beneath the skin; Hale cups it with his palm, and the fight goes out of the nogitsune like a flame in a high wind, and he _sways_ towards Hale, whose other hand finds the small of his back, almost like they're dancing at prom, and the ridiculous image seems to wake him a little, shake him in the brainpan a moment because he is pretty sure that Derek Hale is _holding him_ _tenderly._

No one who has known what he is has ever touched him with kindness like this, and the nogitsune thinks that he might've been nicer, better, _good_, if he had understood the system of rewards a little better. Until this moment, he'd always found himself contemptuous of those who he'd managed to fool, thinking, _surely you love him better than this. Surely you can see him better than this. _And when they inevitably failed the test – when the nogitsune was able to use its host's memory to replicate mannerisms, speech, gait, habit, idiom… when sometimes, even, the nogitsune could sit back and let muscle memory and speech patterns patter on _ahead_ of it… its disdain only deepened. One day it decided that love was a mirage, an illusion that humans projected on any target who would stand still long enough to play along.

But now that Hale is doing the opposite – comforting him in the _hope_ it reaches Stiles Stilinski…

The nogitsune leans his forehead against Derek Hale's shoulder and presses in, because this is _new_ and new is good, and Hale has to give up on him sometime, and that can happen anytime, so this might be the _only_ time he gets to have this.

The nogitsune feels, eventually, that Derek leads him to the side of the cave that is a little higher-ground, an arm around his shoulders, and that they re-settle there, where it's dry. He drinks his Adderall-infused water slowly, until it is completely gone; and Derek reads him poetry:

_Has anyone seen the boy_  
_who used to come here?_

_Round-faced trouble-maker,_  
_quick to find a joke,_  
_slow to be serious, red shirt,_  
_perfect coordination, sly,_  
_strong muscled,_  
_with things always in his pocket:_  
_reed flute, worn pick,_  
_polished and ready for his Talent-_  
_you know that one._

_Have you heard stories about him?_  
_Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian world_  
_collapsed for such a Joseph._  
_I'd gladly spend years getting word_  
_of him, even third or fourth hand._

The nogitsune closes its eyes and doesn't say anything at all.

* * *

"I'm reluctant to give you anything," Derek says when the nogitsune begs that just reading isn't enough. "I don't know what you'll do with it."

The nogitsune doesn't argue. He figures he would leap away from here the moment he had the chance: away from Derek Hale and Scott McCall, and away from Sheriff Stilinski, and he would ruin their lives all over again by being a lost cause if nothing else. And though he cares about that, now – just a _little_ – he also knows himself.

If you know people, you grow attached to them. If you grow attached to them, you care what becomes of them. And tricksters are hedonists who care primarily for their own amusement. So a trickster has to be genius at the art of oblivion. He knows that, after a few days of worry, he would forget them.

But maybe Stiles Stilinski's brain is enough to hold them all?

He's read – (_Stiles has read_) all about the brain, and the way that muscle memory works, and really, if he has muscle memory and factual memory, there is no reason he shouldn't also have memory of _personal _experiences… with all the attendant emotion attached. Unless there is something blocking them.

Self-preservation, maybe. Stiles Stilinski had a boatload of problems _before_ he was possessed. Would he survive the knowledge that he's murdered people, if he could allow himself fully-human memories? Or would the guilt crush him? (_The guilt is already crushing him; he can never be fully human again_.)

Derek is looking at him with narrowed, Sourwolf eyes, so suspicious that what comes out of his mouth next is incongruous; the nogitsune can't parse it for a minute.

"…Scott?" he says, finally, blinking.

"Maybe you're ready for a second visitor?" Hale says, and he says it with such a tentative note in his voice that the nogitsune is quick to reassure him that it's safe.

Is it safe? (_Am I safe?_) The nogitsune isn't sure.

Certainly the opportunity for playing the trickster abounds. He could play the two off of one another. He could ask to be with Scott alone (_would Derek allow that?_) and swear that Derek was abusing him down here. Sexually, maybe, with the way that Derek's scent is all over Stiles's body. He could cry, could beg to be taken somewhere, anywhere else. Could promise to be good. (_Might even mean it._)

But if that fails, how long would it be before Derek would trust him enough to let him have another visitor? What if Derek leaves him alone after that, not just denying him _other_ visitors, but denying him Derek himself? What if Derek leaves him here to rot, _forgets_ to drop down food and water and Adderall?

The nogitsune can't bear it.

But you can't trap a fox, he thinks, vicious. You can't _domesticate_ one. He's angry at the _thought_.

Hale seems to realize that the very idea of another visitor has upset his balance so badly that he won't be able to focus on reading that evening. Instead, Hale yanks him so that Stiles's body is lying partly in his lap and strokes Stiles's newly-clean hair into some kind of order, like he's gotta look his best tomorrow, and the nogitsune snorts before falling deeply asleep.

* * *

(_Scott. Scotty. Scotty-Scott._) is coming. The nogitsune wishes for a mirror, but that could provide a weapon if he broke it, so he won't get one. He knows he doesn't look very much like (_himself_) Stiles Stilinski, who had good color-sense and nice skinny-jeans and interesting shoes, who styled his hair upright with gel every morning and knew how to coordinate layers.

That guy is so dead and gone he feels like an _ancestor._

But he's clean, and yesterday Derek brought deodorant, so he smells all right, and toothpaste, too, although Derek took them both away the moment the nogitsune was done with them. He's slender but no longer skeletal, and if the cave living has been so awesome for him, it's only a testament to how badly he was treating this body, before. Derek's been nodding at him lately, satisfied, saying he's 'putting on weight', which is madness, but since he eats everything the Sourwolf brings him and looks for more, he guesses it must be true. Derek appears and fusses over him, allowing him to re-apply the deodorant and giving him a piece of gum to chew, and messing with his hair and giving him his Adderall.

"I'm not a kindergartener about to be sent off to his first day of school," he says flatly. "You gotta stop fussing."

So Derek does. He stands silently at the nogitsune's side, except for when he reaches out and squeezes their hands together. Then, his head jerks up. Moments later, Stiles's human ears catch up: someone is pacing around the aperture that leads up into the sunlight.

And pacing.

And pacing.

The nogitsune uses Stiles's imagination to picture what's going on up there, Scott all flustered and worried. Stiles's memories spit up the first day of junior high, Stiles helping Scott choose which outfit to wear. _What if no one likes us_, Scott had said, and in any other kid that would've translated to _what if no one likes _me_, _but this was Scott, which meant he was at least as concerned about Stiles as he was about himself.

Then, like thunder after lightning, a wash of fierce protective fondness goes supernova in the vicinity of Stiles's human chest and spreads, tingling, down to his fingers and toes: _Pack, _before Stiles knew what Pack was.

And then Scott's leaping in front of them, making a three-point landing and pushing upright, and before the nogitsune is sure which tack he's going to take, muscle memory is deciding for him: his arms twitch out to the sides, he croaks Scott's name and they're in one another's arms, two asymmetrical halves of some piece of modern art that would fall apart if separated to stand alone, and Stiles's human body is being clasped, being _held_, and his human nose is full of the distinctive smell of his best friend: woodland and fir and teenaged boy, and his ears are full of "Stiles. Stiles. Stiles," said in his best friend's voice, and –

Something ruptures in him like a metastasizing tumor. Like one of those horrible aliens that bursts out of the characters' chests and eats everyone, and...

He cries.

He can't stop, and Scotty is holding him about as tightly as a werewolf can _hold _a human, and he can tell Scott is getting really worried, so he tries to be cool, he's beginning to get that face-heat that means he's turning red with embarrassment, but apparently the crying jag has to die down naturally, and eventually – eventually it does.

"Oh God, dude, I'm so _sorry_," he says when they finally pull back, and it's like he suddenly knows how inadequate that is – that a sword through the chest is nothing, but your best friend – your best friend _like that_, like _he is to Scott – _(_was? Oh god)_ – leaning close, comforting you, telling you it's all right as he twists the blade, with exaggerated concern on his face –

(_He wants to throw up._)

But Scott is taking the oblivious route, either through habit or, in a bout of surprising maturity, _pretending to _assume Stiles is talking about weeping all over him like he did when they watched the Notebook together (_which no one shall speak of henceforth and ever again_). "It's okay," he says, and his eyes are positively _alight_ with joy. "I'm glad you're – in a hugging kind of mood."

"Yeah," Stiles says – because it's _Stiles_ when Scott's around, definitely. He feels… totally, one-hundred percent _human_ around Scott McCall.

Well. Give or take.

When did that happen?

"I brought you a Mountain Dew," Scott says, rooting around in his backpack all shy, and it's like they're meeting again at five years old, and Scott is sharing his M&Ms with Stiles at lunch. Totally evenly, and letting Stiles pick the colors out that he doesn't like.

"Wow, dude, thanks," Stiles says, accepting the drink while looking at Derek.

Derek is watching them like they're a new species on the nature channel, which. Well. The nogitsune can hardly blame him.

"So, uh, tell me the all the news," Stiles says. "How's Lydia?"

"Don't," says Derek.

Scott shoots Derek a look like he's being _totally unfair_, which immediately makes the nogitsune consider the many ways in which he can exploit this attitude. But just as soon as the expression arrives, it disappears, is replaced by weariness.

Scott is familiar with how normal the nogitsune can make this body behave. He sneaks an apologetic look Stiles's way, but leans gamely back against the cave wall and removes Stiles's schoolbooks from his bag.

_Schoolbooks!_

Stiles's human brain and his fox nature need stimulation, and the sight of the schoolbooks wakes a fire in him. Before he's aware of what he's doing, he's babbled a monologue about the poetry Derek has been reading to him and how the book is divided into life-stages, and how that reminds him of Erikson's Phases of Psychosocial Development, and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is what they were learning in Intro to Psychology before Stiles began losing track of his marbles. It can barely be called a conversation, because Stiles's mouth barely lets Scott get a word in edgewise, though eventually even he has to quiet.

By the time he does, he's spoken himself hoarse. He can't stop his hands from roving Scott's form, either, little touches that remind him this is real: brushes of their thighs as they sit together, a rasp of cloth-on-cloth as they reach for a drink at the same time. He's caught himself counting his fingers on _three separate occasions_, and he's pretty sure that Derek caught him at it, too, at least once.

"I brought your homework assignments from the past few weeks," Scott tells him, and he decides he loves Scotty-Scott _forever._

"Oh, man, I never thought I'd be happy to hear anyone tell me they had weeks of assignments for me, but I so, so am. You have no idea how _boring_ it is, down here."

"Do you want me to bring you your phone?"

Gladness springs up in Stiles's heart before he ruthlessly crushes it. "You can order things through the phone. Ship them. Uh, post things to blogs. Send emails. Texts. Hack?"

Scott stares. "But you're better?"

Stiles squirms.

Scott's eyes narrow. "That you're aware of what you shouldn't have. That's a good first step, right? You seem so _normal_."

"Well, I'm faking it. I've _been_ faking it. Don't you remember me _faking it_?" Stiles says, voice breaking.

"…Stiles –"

"I'm not _him_," Stiles hisses, even though it feels like a lie just now. "What does a guy have to do to make you get with the program, shove another sword through your gut and _twist it?_"

Derek, who's been hanging back until now, steps forward.

"And you stay out of this, Sourwolf!" Stiles orders, but as usual his commands to Derek have no effect.

Instead, Derek does his touch-thing which makes him calmer at first, but then angrier, because he is no _tame fox._

"Are you _taking my pain_ when you do that?" Stiles can't believe it hasn't occurred to him until now that this is what Derek is doing when he touches Stiles's neck. It's weird that now he's examining things from the human perspective, he's more suspicious of the human brand of affection.

"Stiles. Stop it," Derek says, quiet.

A second wash of reassurance nearly knocks Stiles's knees together, and this time he can't fight it so hard. Won't. Doesn't want to. He closes his eyes. "Okay. Okay. Scott. Scotty-Scott," he says, turning. "I'm still working on it, okay?"

"Okay," Scotty-Scott says. He sounds gutted. Like, literally, and Stiles should know.

"I really. Thanks for coming. Thanks for the Mountain Dew."

And they're on approach again, Scott opening his arms and Stiles kind of falling into them and squeezing the life out of Scott, who is clearly dampening his werewolf strength to match Stiles's weak humanity _exactly_, so he can grip him _just as hard _and _right after a fight_, but that's Scott and Stiles, and the nogitsune still feels like Stiles Stilinski down underneath his skin when Scott finally leaps out of the aperture and dashes away.

"Huh," Derek says. "I should bring Scott by more often. You should see your face."

The nogitsune doesn't want to see its stolen face. It wants, with great urgency, to know what is happening. "Maybe Deaton next," he says, because if he remembers anything from being Stiles Stilinski, it's that Deaton is who you call when you're clueless as fuck.

"Maybe later on," Derek rumbles. "Really, though. There's, like, a light behind your _eyes_."

"Shut up," the nogitsune says, feeling like warm coals are sitting banked in his chest, his guts, and - yeah - prickling behind his eyes.

* * *

The nogitsune dreams.

It's at the school, in the boys' locker room, and a thready voice emerges from one of the lockers that stands along the wall.

"_Please_," the voice begs. "_Let me out. Let me out._"

"Let me in, Stiles," the nogitsune says, but he says it in Stiles Stilinski's voice, and everything about that voice is just the same, down to that wavering, desperate note.

The locker door bangs open; a whipcord-thin arm, pale, juts forth from its confines to grip the front of the nogitsune's hoodie. Yanks. The locker slams shut.

Suddenly the inside of the locker is big enough for two. Just. The nogitsune is face-to-face with Stiles Stilinski.

Stiles looks like he's panicking. His breaths are coming fast, there are red circles under his eyes – are there still red circles under the nogitsune's? – and his lashes are clumped together with crying. The nogitsune has never seen anything more human in its life. Suddenly, he feels that _alienness_ in himself worse than a hammer's blow. If Scott made him feel like a human being, standing next to the real thing makes him feel like Pinocchio, body stuffed with straw. A golem for someone else's revenges.

The nogitsune decides to try out its newest human skill. It reaches out to Stiles and places its hand at the junction of neck and shoulder and squeezes.

Stiles backs as far away as he can within the confined space. He closes his eyes, and the nogitsune knows it's not because the human touch has relaxed the human boy. He's gasping for breath. In a moment, he'll get that fight-or-flight response, adrenaline, noradrenaline, which will tell him he has to run. He'll flee the locker before the nogitsune can get hold of him and maybe it'll be the last the nogitsune sees of him. Forever.

"Come on, Stiles," it says, ducking down to peer up into Stiles's panicking features. "You were so good, so clever. Such _fun_. Don't tell me you're through."

"I'm gonna… keep fighting you…" Stiles says, although he isn't meeting the nogitsune's eyes. He seems to be talking to himself, if anything, and he nods fiercely once or twice to underscore the promise. "But what are you _doing_?" he says, whispering through tears, and it sounds like calling Scott in the middle of the night, trapped in that basement with god-knew-what, his ankle trapped…

And like thunder after lightning, the desperation of that moment slams into him, on the foundation of faith that Scott would find him, implacable and unshakable.

"…you're not pretending to me be," Stiles is saying. "They _know_ you're not me… What are you even hoping to gain from this?" And then Stiles is looking, really _looking_, and he says, "do you even _know_?"

And the nogitsune's own breath is coming fast, and it can feel the hint of tears clumping its eyelashes together, and then Stiles Stilinkski's eyes are very close to his. The sight of the nogitsune going through a panic attack seems to be surprising enough to cut his own off at the knees.

Stiles's eyes in the crisscrossing of the opening to the locker are a warm, honey-gold as he examines the nogitsune. "Focus on one point. Stop looking around, there's nothing there. Focus on one thing: in the distance, I'd tell you, but there is no distance, is there?"

The nogitsune focuses on Stiles Stilinski's eyes and the locker seems to stop trembling at the corners of his vision. Stiles frowns, then reaches forward to lay his hand on the side of the nogitsune's neck.

"You weren't trying to hurt me. You thought that might calm me down? Because it works on you," Stiles observes, and this is why the nogitsune wanted to be him so badly, because of that whirring brain of his, a machine of a million cogs.

The nogitsune feels wary beneath its admiration: a fox, cornered by the hounds after it's led them a merry chase. But it jerks a nod, looking at Stiles only out of the corner of its eye, now.

"Are you becoming _me_?" Stiles asks. "Because dude, that would be hilarious. And totally, and I mean totally what you deserve. Grieve for what you did to our friends and family. Go ahead, that'll be _awesome_. Rejoice in your ninety-pound weakling status. That's what you get for picking this little hotel."

That _does_ sound like justice to the nogitsune. It even sounds funny – a good trick. If he emerges from this thinking he _is_ Stiles Stilinski.

Suddenly, he knows. That's just what Hale is hoping for.

But how could Hale have guessed that a plan like that would _work_? It's a Divine Move like no other the nogitsune has ever encountered. It hasn't occurred to anyone else that he's anything other than a monster.

It's never occurred to _him_.

So: he's been isolated so that he only sees Derek and Scott. He's been reliant on Derek for company, and Derek is feeding him a steady diet of literature and quiet and physical affection, and it's starting to _work_. They'll call him Stiles and one day, he'll answer to it.

The nogitsune is all kinds of fond of psychological manipulation, and it's not hard to believe that the nogitsune could be led into caring for Derek and Scott, if it has the capability in the first place – and, evidently, it does. But how could they have known that he'd be Stiles, instead of just a tame fox with Stiles's face?

The water. It's the water. Derek brings it every day and watches as he washes it down, and the nogitsune always thought that was because the Adderall is dissolved in it, and if it spills or he forgets to finish it, he'll be off the rest of the day. But what if there _is_ something in it? Or Derek's hands? Derek touches him a lot – a lot more than he touched Stiles Stilinski, ever – and maybe there _is_ something to that. Those were speculations fueled by panic-attack-induced paranoia, sure, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't all out to get you.

Stiles's thumb is stroking the tendon in the nogitsune's neck, and it's just distracting enough that the nogitsune jerks its head up. "What's going on in your head, dude?" Stiles says, and he looks calm and gentle and still very fragile.

"That you're right. I'm becoming _you_. I'm being manipulated. I'm being controlled." The nogitsune remembers: not trusting its own thoughts. Panic. "I'm always being manipulated by someone. Scott came by."

Stiles freezes, like small prey scenting a fox on the wind, but the nogitsune hadn't hurt Scott; it hadn't entered his mind to _want _to.

The nogitsune shakes its head. "I can't do this. I can't be human. I'm not built for it. Push through, Stiles. I'll let you. I'll leave."

Stiles's face changes, and suddenly he looks very grown-up, and very sad. "You know you're dreaming now, right?"

"Yeah," the nogitsune says. Of _course_. "I'm not really in the boys' locker room, so."

"But you gotta know I'm not really _here_. I'm not anywhere anymore. You got rid of me."

"No," the nogitsune says. "No, you're here. You've got to still be _with _me, I can't be alone in this." The thought that he can't step away from the game has him feeling sick, hemmed-in.

"But you are. You've made sure of it," Stiles says. "I'm your memory of Stiles Stilinski. You knew that, right?" He's careful to be sure the nogitsune gets it, the way Stiles is always careful: careful hands, careful mind. "If you left now, this," he says, gesturing to his own body, "would be empty. A toy with dead batteries. Maybe it'd keep breathing, maybe its heart'd keep beating. I don't know. But it wouldn't be me."

* * *

For a long time, the nogitsune lies, still, in the dark. Then, it sits up and scrubs hands through Stiles's crazy hair. (_Hair grows at a rate of 0.5-inches to 1.5-inches a month._) So his hair could be around an inch longer than it was the last time he had a mirror. His hair grows fast; it could be longer.

For the first time, the nogitsune wonders what they're doing to keep Stiles's father away.

Sure, Sheriff Stilinski knows, intellectually, that the body he's wearing no longer houses his son. But the nogitsune believes, with all of Stiles's massive, unshakeable faith in his friends and his family, that the Sheriff wouldn't let that stop him for long.

What's more absolute than the love of a parent for a child? Could the nogitsune really have stood before a wave of such love and stood unaffected?

The answer is _yes_, it thinks. At first, certainly. It would have seemed like _too much._ It would have seemed _impossible_, the strength of that love. The nogitsune would have thought it was a trick, like all the love it's seen before.

But somehow, Derek's care is different: non-romantic, non-brotherly, non-parental, it hovers weirdly in the center of some paradoxical Venn diagram of all three: the behavior of an Alpha to Pack. And the nogitsune could just barely grasp that with the tips of its fingers if it tried when it first landed here.

Now, it feels that way about Sheriff Stilinski's love, like if it lets its attention go out of focus, it can just begin to accept the fierce love Stiles's father feels – out of its emotional peripheral vision – when he looks at his son's… form. Because there's nothing of Stiles Stilinski, left.

The nogitsune isn't sure it believes that, though. It _was_ a dream. What if it were just his worst fears talking to him? What if Stiles Stilinski is in there somewhere, just buried deep? And hiding?

(_And glad of it._)

* * *

He shies away from Hale's touch next time, just in case, and the time after that. Hale looks resigned rather than puzzled, and his casual touches stop for the entirety of the visit.

He finds a hole where he can pour his water; he's been using it for waste, so the splash of liquid around it doesn't even make Hale suspicious. He paces as Hale reads, pouring it down the hole, mouthful at a time.

The day after that, he feels very tired. (_Withdrawal_,) supplies Stiles's semantic memory. He doesn't feel like getting up, and when Hale doesn't show, he doesn't bother.

He's cold. He's always _cold_ lately, his weak human body shivering, but they don't dare give him a blanket, do they? Not when he could tear it into strips and fashion a pulley from it somehow, nosir. Nothing is given to the bricoleur, just time and empty space and a brain that's neither fox nor human and is driving him insane.

He tries to turn his focus on Stiles's schoolwork, but it's no use: the words keep sliding off the page and pooling on the ground, getting ink everywhere. He doesn't feel as panicky as he did when he initially had attacks of aphasia, and maybe that's because it's not actual aphasia but a hallucination, this time. He _knows_ the words aren't sliding off the page in real life.

He's pretty sure.

So he closes his eyes and puts up with Scott yelling at him for stabbing him with a pair of chopsticks, and Derek saying he's disappointing the Pack, and Lydia looking down her perfect nose at him, saying that she'd never date a loser like Stiles Stilinski. He shivers and successfully ignores.

A hand smooths the hair at Stiles's brow, and for a moment he thinks Derek has returned. He opens his eyes and then scrambles back, because it's not.

It's not.

"Baby boy," says Stiles Stilinski's mother.

Her hair is shaved off because she kept _eating_ it. Her gold-brown eyes are huge and purple-ringed in her face, and she's slender enough to be some kind of creature they fight, because she pretty much stopped eating once the illness grew bad enough because she swore her husband was trying to poison her.

"I told you, didn't I?" she says in her gentlest, sweetest voice. The stench of rot and decay hits Stiles's nostrils. "I told you you'd grow up to do terrible things."

"No," the nogitsune says, but the words are sparking one of Stiles's memories, and he's eight and his mother is up out of her hospital bed, and she has stolen a scalpel from somewhere, and she's coming towards him, and Stiles's eight-year-old self can't make it parse because no matter what it's his _mother_ and she won't hurt him, she can't, right, she _told him she would never_, and Stiles believed her, he _believed_ her.

"Just. Like. _Me_," Claudia says, and her voice is vicious and her face is kind, and the nogitsune doesn't know what to do with this feeling. It's never felt anything this bad before.

He leans to the side and vomits, as though he could expel the feeling from his body by force.

"Oh, Baby Boy," she says. "Do you need to stay home from school today? Are you feeling… _sick?_" Her hands move through his hair. "You're filthy, aren't you, inside and out? Maybe you'll never be well enough for school."

"Stop. Stop. Please don't. Stiles. _Stiles_. You've got to come out. I can't. I can't. Don't make me _do_ this alone."

"Talking to himself," Claudia says to an invisible audience, clucking her tongue. "Freak. Insane. They've locked you up down here, haven't they? And left you here to die when they grew tired of you. You didn't think they were trying to _reform you_, did you? Save you? Awww, sweetheart," she says in a parody of motherly affection that makes the nogitsune want to vomit again and again. "No. You're here to learn what it is to be loved, so you can know what it feels like to be betrayed. That's their revenge. It's good, isn't it?"

He wants to die. He wants to die. He wants to _die_.

He can't. There's nothing _down_ here. The rock and the string can't kill him. If he accelerated the string with enough velocity around his head repeatedly, he might summon enough force to knock himself out. But there's nothing, nothing, nothing else, and the only thing worse than going through withdrawal and dying of thirst in the dark is going through withdrawal and dying of thirst in the dark with a head injury, so. Not in the cards.

"Stiles. Stiles. _Stiles_," Claudia says, insistent, but then, as if he's in a dream where someone you _swear_ is one person wears the face of another, he begins to realize it's Melissa in front of him. Melissa McCall. She's wearing her nursing scrubs, cornflower blue today. "Stiles?"

He brings his hand in front of his eyes, and she waits while he counts.

"Hiya," she says.

"H-hiya," the nogitsune replies.

"Off your meds?" she says.

He examines her warily. New people are making him wary, and so are hallucinations. He doesn't think she _is_ a hallucination, is the thing. She looks very matter-of-fact, very Melissa, but she doesn't belong down here, so her presence is very suspect. "Yeah, I. Yeah."

"Okay," she says. "I'm not gonna lie to you. It's bad."

"Like, how bad?"

"Like, your heart stopping bad," Melissa replies. "Come on, sweetheart. We're taking you out of here."

For the first time, he sees Scott standing behind Melissa, eyes gleaming red in the half-light. How Melissa got down. How Melissa's going to leave.

How _he's _going to leave?

The fox stretches its limbs for what feels like the first time in a long time.

"I wouldn't have let this happen," Melissa is saying. "I can't believe Scott let this happen. I have your meds. Can you swallow all right?"

The nogitsune makes Stiles's head nod, because he can barely believe his good fortune, having Melissa McCall come to his rescue. She tips two pills out into his hand and helps him sit up.

_Loading dose?_ he thinks, and then realizes that the pills don't look anything alike.

"My Adderall…" he says.

"And your Clozaril." She doesn't seem impatient at all. Like she's used to waiting for him to catch up?

He stares at the small, green pill in the palm of Stiles's hand. "Clozaril."

Melissa's eyes narrow in concern. "Do you remember the conversation we had in the hospital after the blackout?"

"After the – no, I don't remember anything. Neither of us," he adds, swiping a hand through his hair.

"Clozaril is an antipsychotic," Melissa explains. "You're taking it for schizophrenia."

Stiles's whirring brain stutters, slips a cog before gamely creaking forward. "Hallucinations. My mom – his mother – was here."

Melissa nods. "Your hallucinations can make you violent, and you can get paranoid. Do you remember that?"

"_I _can get paranoid? And violent?"

Melissa takes a breath and nods.

"When I'm not on my meds," he says, slowly. "Like… now? Are you trying to say I'm – he's – not possessed? This is bullshit," the nogitsune says. It lifts itself to its feet and crowds Scott against the wall, lifts him up by the throat. "I can do _this_, I can do all kinds of things I shouldn't be able to do."

Scott doesn't seem inclined to move. "I just know the Clozaril helps your control, and mom and I don't think the nogitsune _is_ in control anymore. Because couldn't a demon-god get out of here? Wouldn't he have done that ages ago? If he really wanted that?"

He looks up at Scott. "The oni. They tested me. I wasn't myself."

"You aren't," Melissa says, hands where he can see them, eyes on her son but making no move to stop him. "You're not the Stiles we know. Of course you're not. They sensed it."

The nogitsune trembles. "Oh my god, this is a really good trick," he says, lowering Scott to the floor, where he turns onto his hands and knees and coughs. "But – weeks? That'd mean that Stiles planted the bombs himself. Without the nogitsune? Because he felt threatened? Paranoid? About the _police?_ His father's the Sheriff, the police should make him feel safe."

"Stiles, your father wasn't at the station, and you knew that," Melissa says, and it sounds _practiced_, like they've _had this conversation before_, oh god. "You put Derek and Chris there, to punish them, but you knew they'd survive because… they're Derek and Chris. And of course you were pissed at the police, they'd put your father on notice."

"Stiles wouldn't hurt his coach."

"Our most irritating teacher, next to Harris?" Scott says from the floor, looking none the worse for wear but - what? Reluctant to stand, be thought of as a threat? "Listen, even I've wanted to stab him a time or two. Like, in a passing thought kind of way."

"So you're saying that nearly everything I've done is because Stiles secretly _wanted_ to do it? What about totally destroying the hospital, I – he wouldn't have wanted to do that."

There's a beat of silence. "We couldn't help your mom," Melissa says, soft, and Stiles feels himself pale. "We tried. You've got to know we tried. But her doctor didn't believe her symptoms at first, did he, Stiles? He said she was under a lot of stress, at first, that she should get more sleep. I read her file."

The nogitsune (_Stiles?_) searches her face.

"Stiles," says Scott, slow. "Me and mom think you won. Like, a long time ago. But… by then, you'd done a lot of things that you really regretted and so –"

"No," he says, cutting Scott off. "No, I – I hurt you. He _hurt_ you."

Scott presses his lips together and approaches, slowly. The nogitsune shuffles away until the small of its back is pressed against the cave face. It gulps, eyes flickering over to Melissa, who hasn't moved, who is staring at the pair with a trembling line of worry at her brow. But then the hands on him pull him back to Scott, who is searching his face with so much sorrow that the air seems to have been sucked away from Stiles's lungs.

"I know it hasn't always been easy. Being my friend," Scott says, lips twitching in an almost-smile. "You always stuck by me, but I'm not stupid enough to think I've never ticked you off, that one of your dark impulses would never be to hurt me."

The nogitsune shakes Stiles's head. Opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

"Even if you're in a human body, Stiles has the spark, and I think it makes you a little stronger and faster when you've gotta be, right? Or you wouldn't be able to lift me up using Stiles's muscles. He can't normally press a hundred and seventy pounds," Scott says with a hint of desperate humor, and the nogitsune can't imagine what he's getting at until he adds, "so slicing me in half with a katana wouldn't have been a problem. If you'd wanted to."

The nogitsune stares, because the logic is irrefutable: he could have easily killed Scott whenever he wanted to – _if_ he'd wanted to. Maybe he thought that he could continue to feed off of Scott's despair for awhile longer, but Derek is right: holding the sword and twisting it while he spoke in a voice full of care was the most suffering he was ever going to be able to cause Scott McCall.

Killing Scott would have terrified everyone. Derek would have felt the bitter sting of guilty failure, relived the loss of his whole family. Allison would have been in anguish, and Melissa's grief would have dwarfed hers. The idea that Stiles had murdered his best friend would have destroyed his father. The loss of the alpha would have destabilized the pack. It is a possibility, even, that Stiles, as Scott's murderer, would have assumed leadership of the Beacon Hills pack. He could have become an alpha.

He could be an alpha right now, if he so chooses. He is still holding the jagged rock in his palm. He has Scott at a disadvantage, because Scott trusts this face, even after all the nogitsune has done, wearing it. He has the element of surprise on his side.

But.

What if Scott and Melissa are right?

What if he is a crazy – (_homicidal!)_ – schizophrenic mundane? Then, he realizes there is a pretty easy way to figure it all out. (_Empiricism. The philosophy of science that emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments, rather than resting solely on _a priori_ reasoning, intuition, or revelation._)

He pops both pills into his mouth and swallows them dry. Melissa sighs, and Scott slumps over, panting.

"Okay," he says, lips twitching. "Okay, I'm Stiles Stilinski. If that's what you really believe, take me out of here. Take me home."

* * *

A/N: Okay, folks. I see that five of you have bookmarked this, but not commented. The only reason I post stories is to get feedback, so feed the beast! Or feed it at ao3. :)

There is a font of nogitsune-related fic that I am about to release. That storyline gave me a lot of ideas; and I was really very disappointed with the second half of 3B, so I plan to re-write it to my heart's content. :D

-K


	3. III of V

He leaves the cave and he's even kind of more impressed with Derek and the others because it's a _man-made_ protrusion into a cave that probably wasn't even accessible before, and is now hidden by a copse of pine trees.

Scott supports most of his weight on one side, which is good, because the pills haven't really kicked in, yet, and the forest at night is doing some _weird shit. _He breathes a sigh of relief once they come across Melissa's car parked just off the road at the edge of the Preserve, tires all crunched down on pine needles and fresh earth.

It's a good one, he'll give them that, he thinks as Melissa turns the ignition key and pulls out onto the dark, empty road. Paranoid-Schizophrenic Genius Terrorizes Small Town. It'd make a great headliner for the Beacon Hills Gazette.

So Stiles Stilinski is him, and he is Stiles, but Stiles has had first a demonic possession, followed closely by an (_understandable?_) psychotic break. Or at the very least, that's the McCalls' current premise, whether they believe it or not.

Is that what Derek believes? If so, why didn't he ever say anything?

And why did he stop showing up?

He doesn't realize he's said this aloud until Scott replies from the passenger seat. "There are some issues in the territory," he says, and the nogitsune snorts, because _oh, really? There's trouble in Beacon Hills?_ But then Scott's words catch up with him.

"Sourwolf is hurt?"

"Derek's fine," Melissa says. "Which is more than I can say for how he'll be after I'm through with him. Leaving you alone in that place."

The nogitsune is silent. He considers _I'd have tried killing you all again_. Tries, _he was with me every day until yesterday_. Can't make it work either way. So he swerves, changes tack. "So, according to you, the oni were real, and they knew I was losing my mind. What summoned them, then, if the nogitsune was already gone, or suppressed? Stiles's scintillating personality?"

Scott turns to face him from the front passenger side. "Kind of. We knew someone was giving Barrow orders, so we did a spell to summon the oni to find out who it was. It was your own idea."

"Come on," the nogitsune says. "What about the lichen, the green lichen that Deaton gave him? That brought Stiles back," he presses when Scott continues to look confused.

"I think you're talking about the Clozaril," Melissa says, gently, keeping her eyes on the road. "It's green, and Deaton forced you to swallow it, that first time. You thought it would poison you. You seemed a little better after that, definitely a lot less violent and a little less confused. That was when you committed yourself, but Eichen House wasn't the best place for you."

"You got a lot worse," Scott supplies. "But now… Mom, look at him. He _knows_ us. He's so much better. Derek knew what he was doing."

"Stiles still thinks he's a mythical fox-creature, so _no_," Melissa says, and pulls over.

The nogitsune is confused until he realizes they're at the McCall house already. He blinks a few times. Counts his fingers, because it feels totally unreal after a month of isolation.

"Until Derek Hale gets a PhD in psychology, he doesn't know what's best for a schizophrenic patient," Melissa is still chiding Scott. "I know he was your Alpha, but I'm your mother with an _actual background in medicine,_ and Stiles is a human being. Derek won't always know what's best for him."

"I'm not a human being," the nogitsune says. He shrugs. "Sorry, but it's true." He slides out of the backseat only to find that his legs won't hold him, and he goes down in a messy heap of limbs.

"Okay, okay, easy there," Melissa says, and she and Scott hold him up like bookends. "Even supposing you're right, you're in a human body now. So you've got to listen to its demands."

"Its shrill, shrill demands," the nogitsune snarks, and is rewarded with a smile and a squeeze around the shoulders.

"Insistent, isn't it?" she says, and the two support him all the way into the house.

It's all nuts, everything they're spouting, but the shower pretty much makes listening to all their babble worth it.

_Hot water. Oh, god._

It beats down on the back of Stiles's body, turning his skin an angry, coral pink, and the nogitsune doesn't care. It's so good, this simple human comfort, that he stays in until he's all pruny, accepts Scott's help into sweatpants and a tee shirt and collapses into the bed, asleep nearly before he hits the pillow.

* * *

The nogitsune dreams.

He's in the basement. His leg is trapped and bleeding against the cold floor. It's icy down here in Eichen House. (_Except that's not really where he is, is it? It's cold outdoors. It's freezing. Do you want to die, Stiles?_)

He just wishes he could give Scott more, but he has no idea where he _is_.

Something bad is going to happen if he knows, so – he doesn't.

But something bad will also happen if he doesn't. The creature, with the evil, iron rasp of a voice is stalking him. It's going to catch him, he knows. It's going to catch him no matter what, (_so he's placed himself here in this dream like prey, far away from anyone he knows. He's run the Jeep's battery out so the monster has to travel on foot. His body is out in the woods; it'll take him hours to get back to town, hours before he could stumble across another living soul. Lydia will know, she'll hear him coming. She'll take care of it. He trusts her. He has to trust her._)

He thinks / not thinks. It's a trick, keeping something from oneself, but Stiles manages.

The mummified creature pulls into view. Kanji for identity, a backwards five. Telling him it's trying to save Stiles's life. Telling him it's too cold for Stiles to survive, that he's stopped shivering. The creature seems helpful for a minute, but Stiles knows better.

This thing will destroy everyone he loves. Because it's _fun_.

(_But he's done the best he can. They'll be safe. They'll be safe from him._)

_Please_, Stiles thinks, wrapping his wrists around his throbbing ankle. _Please find me_.

(_Please, Stiles thinks: never find me again._)

* * *

The nogitsune wakes to sunshine on its face and Lydia Martin's green eyes at close range.

"You're alive," she says.

"No," he says, blinking the sleep out of his eyes.

"No?" She's wearing one of her sweet little dresses, lemon yellow-and-gold, with gold lamé high heels and a gold necklace. Her hair is done up with wisps falling down.

The nogitsune still remembers when Lydia Martin was the most beautiful thing Stiles had ever seen.

"No," he says. "I'm not alive."

"Oh," Lydia says, and seats herself in a chair by the bed in – yes – he's in the McCall's spare bedroom. He barely remembers collapsing here. "I didn't know I saw ghosts, too."

The nogitsune snorts.

"You seem better," she says. "I'm really glad."

Against its will, the nogitsune feels a little touched. "Thanks."

She tilts her head to the side. "Anytime." She frowns at him. Then, she leans down over Stiles's body and presses her lips to his.

The memory hits him right between the eyes: (_I read somewhere that holding your breath can stop a panic attack._) Lydia is kissing with intent this time, her right hand cupping his cheek, and when she withdraws, he feels just as baffled and thrown as he did, before.

"That just happened. You actually kissed me. Right?"

Lydia opens her eyes. "Mmm hmm. Maybe I was hoping it'd snap you out of it, like last time. Like maybe my kiss could… wake you up. Like a sleeping prince."

He uses Stiles's hand to snake out and snag her at the wrist. For an instant, he sees her features flash into a fearful expression, but when her eyes light on his, it eases.

She must see something safe within him. She must see something she can trust.

"The thing is," he says, haltingly. "The thing is, if it wasn't – if I was just sick. Then Stiles did a lot of those terrible things on his own. Could he even live with that?"

Lydia smiles sadly and ruffles his hair. "I think that's what we're waiting to find out." She lifts a small volume off the nightstand with one hand – the nogitsune catches a glimpse of a swarm of numbers and symbols – but the other settles in Stiles's hair, gently tugging the strands straight. Between one stroke and the next, the nogitsune is asleep again.

* * *

Hale is back, looking far worse for wear. Despite werewolf healing, the side of his face seems beaten _in_, so the nogitsune can only imagine what it must've looked like a day or two ago. But then Hale's eyes light on him and he offers up a dazzling smile, the one that gives his face a unique, three-dimensional _reality_ that it otherwise lacks. "You're awake," he says.

"Hi, Sourwolf," the nogitsune says. "They kidnapped me."

"I see that. I got an earful from Melissa McCall."

"Why didn't you tell me you thought I wasn't the nogitsune anymore?"

Hale eyes him. "Because to confront someone who's in a delusional state is asking for trouble. The more you argue, the less they believe you. I thought you had to come to it on your own."

He almost _did_. He thinks, given another week or two, he would have begun to wonder not just why he hadn't tried harder to escape Derek and the others, but whether a deity like a nogitsune even had the capacity to care for other people the way he cared for these humans around him. The way he had a vested interest in their survival.

"In all the shows Stiles watched as a kid," he says, "there was an insane asylum episode. Like, the character awakens in the mental health ward of wherever, and they're told there's no such thing as werewolves. Demons. Vampires. Fill in the blank. And there's no magic in this new world they're in. And if the writer's worth their salt, they leave a little doubt at the end whether the world with the insane asylum is real or whether the magical world is, because it's a common human fear that there is something not quite right with us."

"Them."

"What?"

"You said, 'secret human fear'. I'm not human, and neither are you – right?"

The nogitsune rolls its eyes. "Yeah, whatever. But you also notice, right, that all these people go through these crazy disasters in their magical worlds, but there's, like, no counseling, no therapy. They just move forward regardless. So I began to think _insanity or supernatural activity._ Not insanity _and_ supernatural activity. And now it turns out they're not mutually exclusive."

Derek ducks his head. "No."

"Like, how'd you do it?"

Derek looks up. The light is somehow finding his eyes. Like always. It's unfair.

"Your family. They're dead. And your uncle killed your older sister, and now he's better – at least a little – but he's just _around_. Didn't you ever blame yourself? Why haven't you gone insane?"

Derek's grey eyes have turned into chips of ice. "I do blame myself. But I don't let it all rest on my shoulders. It's not like Argent caught me wandering down Main Street one day and saw an _opportunity_, she was looking for a way in. She'd have found it. Her father instilled that kind of thinking into her, so I could blame him. My family was even to blame, like you said, for being too stupid to get out in time, for rushing to their panic room and not realizing that a room made of reinforced steel would heat up enough to kill them all."

"I didn't mean that," he begins, then realizes that he kind of had, at the time. He suspects – as he had when he was Stiles – that there's more to the story of how Derek's family died than anyone has ever told him, because the pieces don't fit together as well as they should. That may be because Derek doesn't know the whole truth, or just that he considers it his private business. Given Sourwolf's nature, denial and obfuscation seem equal contenders.

"You're to blame for your actions," Derek says, not noticing or sweeping over the nogitsune's silence, "but we're also to blame for not noticing your illness. Your father for thinking it was just the normal level of freaking out at the supernatural. Me, for thinking you were human and that made your _way of thinking_ more fragile, that you'd adjust on your own without my help. Scott should have come to me or his mother about your panic attacks right away, but instead he kept them to himself, as though your health concerns were a shameful secret between friends. For that matter, Lydia could be to blame because she couldn't hold you tight enough, didn't have a strong enough connection to you to hold you fast when you were sacrificed. Because you lost yourself after the Nemeton, Stiles: your ability to reason and make connections went downhill fast, and you didn't recover like the others. So you can blame your English teacher, too, if you want, and the werewolves who destroyed her, and on and on."

"But Stiles is mostly to blame," he says.

"Yes, _Stiles_ is," Derek says. "You should've had better control. You should've come to one of us faster, not just when you thought it was your own handwriting on the board, but at the first signs of serious illness, and you didn't."

"What would you have done?" he demands. "Sent me off to Eichen House right away?"

Derek leans forward and growls: his eyes flash bright blue and his canines elongate. "What do you think? I would've trained you!"

"Trained me?" Suddenly, he sees everything in a new, weird light. Scott almost killed Stiles on the first full moon, and Scott has the least darkness in his soul of any human being the nogitsune has ever known. When the nogitsune first took hold of Stiles, he was like a new-turned werewolf, with a dark, dangerous side that could make him do terrible things. Scott could've easily hurt someone, if he hadn't had Stiles to help him. Could've killed them.

And then he realizes that this is exactly what Derek _has_ been doing. Keeping him isolated so he can't hurt anyone, not even himself. Slowly introducing members of the Pack into his life again, starting with who he trusts most and working outwards. Surely Isaac is somewhere around here, but Stiles hasn't seen his face, yet, and that's probably because Derek feels he isn't ready to. Like, in fact, when he asked to speak to Deaton and Derek demurred?

Derek smiles, and it's the third expression he's ever seen on Derek Hale's face that makes any sense. One side of his lip is curled up, the other down: his brows are lowered, and his eyes are intent on Stiles's face.

Derek looks proud, and sad, and a little like he might cry.

Stiles can't deal with that, so he leans forward to cup his hand around the injury along Derek's cheekbone. "So what happened? Did you have a run-in with a brick wall?"

Derek's face falls back into familiar, impassive lines, and he tells Stiles the story of the latest threat to Beacon Hills.

* * *

The nogitsune waits until everybody goes to sleep, then creeps out the front door and closes it quietly behind him.

Gosh, they didn't even lock the bedroom door. When are they gonna learn? It's a good thing he is on his meds and feels more settled and logical than he has in – than Stiles – huh. It's a good thing he feels like Stiles Stilinski right now, all a-thrum with the positive energy of solving a puzzle, playing a game.

He heads for the veterinary clinic on foot. God knows where the Jeep is, and the nogitsune doesn't mind the walk. After being confined for so long, he walks loose and bares his throat to the wind. He doesn't even mind how cold it is, how the air cuts through his hoodie and down to skin and bone. When he arrives, he feels refreshed, alive, vibrating with positive energy.

He picks the lock and slips inside, strides for the swinging mountain ash door and stands there, for a moment, gathering his nerve. He takes in a breath. Another. Lifts his hand up and _presses_…

Against a crackling blue barrier.

Something inside his chest squeezes. A trick. All a trick, the way they said they felt, the way they looked at him, the press of Derek's hands, of Lydia's lips, the ferocious squeeze of Scott McCall's arms, pressing him close. How'd they make up a _story_ like that? It fits the facts so well…

Almost as well as his own version.

They had to have known. Was his mother right? Did he have to love them all so that they could be revenged?

Oh god. What if it's worse? What if they really _believe_?

"Turn around. Slowly," says a very familiar voice, and it's Sheriff Stilinski standing by the door, gun out.

Of course it is.

* * *

A/N: Read? Review!


	4. IV of V

He turns. Slowly. Hands in the air. Sardonic expression firmly in place.

"_Stiles_?"

Well. At least Stiles's father wasn't in on it. That's something. Right?

He can't respond to 'Stiles'. That isn't fair to the Sheriff. It's not his name, and he's sick of stealing.

"Stiles!"

He shrugs, gives a half-smile.

"Oh my god," the Sheriff says, and he's being clasped to a warm chest.

The nogitsune wonders if Stiles Stilinski has been touched so much in his whole life as he has been in the last month.

"Stiles. Stiles. Stiles," his father says, chanting his son's name like it's a protective charm. He pulls back. "God. It _is_ you, isn't it?"

The nogitsune looks at the Sheriff's hopeful eyes and trembling lip and makes a conscious decision. It lets its eyes fill with tears. "Yeah, Dad. It's me," he says as they fall down both cheeks, and he gets another, desperate clasp for his trouble as the Sheriff half-laughs, half-cries into Stiles's old shirt.

Stiles's father won't let go of him, keeps one arm slung around his shoulder as they head out to his patrol car, lights flashing.

"How'd you know to get here so fast?" he says, because humans don't normally have this sort of timing.

"Deaton had a security alarm installed," the Sheriff says. "Here, lie down in the back, you can spread out."

He lets himself be bundled into the backseat of the cruiser – he's just slept for ages, how is he still _so tired_? – and a moment later, the Sheriff opens the door again to throw a blanket around his son's shoulders. "You're freezing," he says, and moves to the front seat.

"I get it," the nogitsune says. "Anyone breaking into the vet at night is a supernatural entity, right? Is there a camera? What'd you do when you saw it was me?"

The Sheriff turns around from the front seat to look at Stiles. "I made sure I got the cruiser with the bulletproof glass," he says, softly.

"Oh," the nogitsune says. He realizes he is in the back of a police cruiser despite the empty space in the front seat. He swallows past a throat so dry it clicks. "Did – did you see me go behind the counter?"

The Sheriff stares at him sadly for a moment, as though he isn't sure whether or not to respond, but then he nods, once. "Saw you try," he says.

The nogitsune thumps his head against the back of the seat, which is highly padded lest other individuals do the same and harm themselves. "Thanks for the blanket, anyway. I really am freezing. I left without a jacket. Don't suppose we're going to your house? I could use something warm that fits me."

"As a matter of fact, that's exactly where we're going," the Sheriff says, and pulls out of the clinic's parking lot.

"Are you going to shoot me?" he says. "I don't think you should."

The Sheriff issues a noise somewhere between a snort and a sob.

"I don't think you should," the nogitsune says. "You could get Hale to do it. I don't think anyone can break him worse than he's already broken. But you don't have to. You shouldn't have to," he says. There's a sharp, wounded feeling in his chest like someone has reached into his diaphragm and _twisted_, and suddenly he's out of words and there's wetness on his cheeks.

From what the nogitsune can see through the gap between Stiles's fingers, the Sheriff's heart is breaking. Broken. But he's not pulling over, which is too bad.

Feeling worn and wrung out, he lets the crying jag pass. He thinks of sharing the conversation with Claudia and isn't sure if it's because it's a nightmare he has to talk out with his father, or if he's the monster who wants to see the man in the front seat squirm.

He needs Hale. Hale promised to train him. Hale promised to watch over him. Hale wouldn't let him hurt anybody. He should have stayed put; he should have known better than to think he was ready for this.

They pull into the drive and the Sheriff turns to face his son's body in the back seat. "I'm going to come back there with my gun drawn," he says, "and cuff you. If you struggle, I will shoot. I'd probably turn my gun on myself afterwards because I'd have to," he says, voice going thick, "but I'd do it because it's my job. I have to protect this town."

The nogitsune feels a sensation that is the opposite of a blush as the blood leaves his face, goes silent and still as the Sheriff approaches the back door to the cruiser, because he believes it. He stares straight ahead, only looking down when the Sheriff's hand lifts Stiles's by the wrist, lacing one cuff around it, then the next. The nogitsune looks up into the Sheriff's face once he's done, and the man holsters his weapon and trembles. He slams the back door to the cruiser, leaving his son's form inside, and for a moment all the nogitsune can see is the torso of Stiles's father, uniform-clad, silent and still through the back window. Unmoving.

Then, the nogitsune can see him walking around the cruiser. He doesn't think Sheriff Stilinski knows that, from this angle, he can just make out the man's arms as he folds them on top of the cruiser, rocking back and forth for a few heartbeats, then shoves himself away again to return to the back door where the nogitsune is waiting. It all reminds the nogitsune sharply of Stiles, this useless, pendulum motion; the comparison makes him feel even quieter and paler and more contained. When the Sheriff pulls him forward by the cuffs, it's like all the energy has gone out of Stiles's body. He feels like he did when his father admitted that he was losing his job because of Stiles. That feeling is the worst in Stiles's recent memory. Until now. Because if Sheriff Stilinski had been disappointed and hurt and angry then, the blank horror and despair on the other man's face now is several orders of magnitude worse. _ I'd go if I could,_ he realizes. He would, too. If he could figure out how to leave Stiles alone, he'd do it, but then Stiles's body would collapse here and what good would that do? What would his father be left with, then?

The nogitsune stumbles over his own feet as they take the steps, but then they're inside, and the Sheriff drags him to the garage where he unearths a length of chain. He returns his son's body to the kitchen and wraps the length of chain around a load-bearing column in the kitchen, then uncuffs one half of the handcuffs and uses it as a padlock, threading several chains through its loop.

It's pretty well done. If the nogitsune wants to break free, he'll have to break the metal on the cuff, his own wrist, the load-bearing column, or many lengths of chain. He smiles in approval and sits down in a kitchen chair because he wants to, because despite all this everything looks like home, because he wants to face the Sheriff and because he's very tired.

He'd like to say _now what_, but it's clear that the Sheriff is gathering himself. Getting ready for some kind of confrontation with a trickster deity. Maybe even he doesn't know what comes next. When the older man finally speaks, his words spill over one another.

"Where have you _been_?"

The nogitsune blinks, rapidly. It tries to re-order its thinking. Of course the Sheriff has wondered where his son's body has been. Of course he couldn't have known where Stiles was. If he'd known –

Images suffused with warmth leap into Stiles's mind: the Sheriff, arriving with _all the police of everywhere_, lifting Stiles upwards, out of that dark hole. The Sheriff, wrapping a blanket around Stiles's slender shoulders, just as he had in the police cruiser. A warm mug of hot cocoa pressed into Stiles's hands, and hell to pay for whoever'd done Stiles wrong.

"I know. I never call, I never write," the nogitsune rasps.

Something in the older man's expression collapses in on itself, like a building with the supports removed.

"You keep forgetting, don't you? Me, too," the nogitsune says. "One moment you're nothing, _nothingness_, and then there's so _much_ of you that it can barely fit inside. It spills out all over everything, and I can't – I can't…" Stiles's muscle memory tells him to meet the Sheriff's eyes to convey important information, to do so unflinchingly. "I tried taking all my Adderall."

Sheriff Stilinski seats himself at the other kitchen chair, and if it weren't for the chains and the cuffs, it would feel like a dozen other talks from the nogitsune's stolen collection of memories. The tears and the desperation aren't even out of place. "Please," the Sheriff says, and his voice breaks. He clears his throat and tries again. "Please don't kill him. He's all I have. Just tell me what you _want_."

"What I _want_?" the nogitsune gasps. _Chaos. Strife._ The words surface automatically in the tumult of his mind, but he bats them away. He's no longer feeding on chaos and strife, and the knawing hunger that has always clawed at his insides is a distant memory.

The nogitsune examines the Sheriff's grief-stricken face and Stiles's heart seems to pause, then thump like a kick to the sternum. (_Arrythmia. Stress/exercise-induced. Harmless._)

No, the nogitsune thinks. This is what a broken heart feels like. He shakes his head. He can't speak. If he opens his mouth, he'll howl.

The Sheriff rises from his seat, and for a moment the nogitsune thinks he's going to leave him here, _alone_ here, but he moves to the sink and turns the tap. When he turns to face his son's body, his expression is more complicated; the nogitsune can't parse it. He returns to Stiles's side with a damp washcloth, and reaches forward.

The nogitsune flinches, but the Sheriff is only wiping the salty crusts of dry tears and the cool paths of fresh ones off of Stiles's cheeks. The nogitsune's breath stutters, caught in his throat like an unfamiliar word.

"Maybe there isn't something you want," the Sheriff says, trailing the washcloth over Stiles's sweaty forehead and the back of his neck and leaving a wash of blessed coolness behind. Stiles's eyes flutter shut. "Maybe there's something you need? Tell me what's the matter," the Sheriff says in a softer voice, and the nogitsune figures he's tired of the game, it's not like he thinks a creature like a nogitsune could really _mean it_ when it cries. The Sheriff wants to hear the nogitsune's demands, he wants to know how he can get the _real Stiles_ back: Stiles with his mind like the razor-sharp edge of a Mobius strip, Stiles, who effortlessly cares for people. His sarcasm-as-only-defense self.

"I'm all that's left of your son," the nogitsune says, eyes still closed.

The Sheriff makes no noise, though the sweeping washcloth withdraws.

"Don't worry, that's a lot," he babbles, opening his eyes. "Everything is still up here," he adds, tapping at his skull. He remembers doing the same to Derek; how he was trying to scare him. It feels like the shoe's on the other foot, this time. "I know Scott and Derek and I know _you_, everything, everyone's familiar but _me_, I don't know who _I _am, and could you help me with that? Because that's what I _need_."

"I don't understand," Sheriff Stilinski says.

"Don't give me that, of course you do," the nogitsune growls. Stiles's hands try to flap, to gesture, but they're bound. "You know your son when you see him, right? So tell me."

The Sheriff seats himself again in the chair across from Stiles's body. Swallows.

The nogitsune stares up at him; in his chest, a bird is trying to break free of the cage of his ribs. The older man's expression is full of agony and hope, and the nogitsune doesn't dare breathe.

A smile looks like it's trying to grow on Stiles's father's face. It starts out small, dissolves into doubt; blossoms; disappears again.

"Dad?" the nogitsune tries.

"My son is still in there," he says, and the nogitsune isn't sure whether it's faith or hope that's speaking. "And I want him to come home." The Sheriff reaches out to place his hand atop Stiles's hair, and the familiarity of it is striking, the amusement, exasperation, and love, love, _love_ and the nogitsune wishes it were Stiles Stilinski so hard that it feels like a physical pain in Stiles's chest.

* * *

The nogitsune rubs Stiles's unbound wrists, then lays down on the couch.

(_You can't_.)

Stiles's father lays a warm blanket over him, tucks it around his shoulders.

(_You can't do this._)

"Stiles?"

"Mmm?"

The nogitsune freezes, darts a glance up. Because it's happened. He's _answered to the name_.

The horror must show on Stiles's mobile face, because the Sheriff's features squeeze together in brief discomfort.

"It's okay. Scott and Derek call me Stiles, too."

"_Scott_ knew where you were?" The Sheriff sighs at something he reads on Stiles's face. "We'll talk about that later. Do you think you can sleep?"

(_STOP._)

"I think so. I'm still so tired."

"It's going to take a long time for you to really sleep it out," his father says, tentative.

(_He's not yours. Leave him alone!_)

"Yeah, I guess," he replies, closing his eyes.

* * *

The nogitsune dreams.

He is in a field. The field goes on forever, in all directions. There are flowers in the field: shiny-petalled buttercup, California poppy. A kindly glow of gold against the green. He is alone.

Then, a flicker, and Stiles Stilinski is standing before him, all shaved hair (shaved hair?), big eyes, and vulnerable slope of shoulders.

"Hi!" the nogitsune says with its best, most charming grin.

Stiles's best. Whatever.

"You can't _do _this," Stiles says, and he sounds tired. So, so tired. There are still these red circles under his eyes, and he looks like he's been crying. "This isn't the way it's supposed to work."

"Can't what? Can't take your dad from you? Looks like I have," the nogitsune says, with a satisfied grin.

"Please," Stiles says, and some native stubbornness creeps back into his eyes, some tension in his limbs.

"_Please_," the nogitsune echoes, taunting. "Has that ever worked, before? Besides, what do you care? You aren't even here, right? You aren't even _real_."

"I _am_," Stiles growls. His red eyes flash with anger, and he pushes the nogitsune, hard, at both shoulders.

The nogitsune goes sprawling, a tangle of long limbs. "Ouch, _shit_, you made me bite my tongue," it says, riding out the pain. "Fuck, that hurts."

"Yeah, how's that for real?" Stiles says, but something around the eyes gives him away.

He's still terrified. Off-balance.

Good time for a gamble, then, the nogitsune decides. "Nice work, really, hiding. Pretending. Making me believe I was you, losing my mind? Turnabout's fair play, or so everyone keeps telling me. How often were you talking to Scott and Sourwolf without me?"

Stiles's shoulders slump, and his eyes go flatter, somehow, like the nogitsune is looking at itself, at a glass-eyed puppet. "I thought if you believed I wasn't real, maybe you'd leave me alone."

"And then what? Oh, wait, no, I've got it. Until Hale or Scotty found some way to bring you back, right? Were you protecting your sanity by hiding?" The nogitsune peers into Stiles's face. "Did it work?"

"I thought if you believed I wasn't real," Stiles says, as though the nogitsune hasn't spoken, "maybe you'd start to think that you were."

A starburst of warmth in the nogitsune's chest, and the nogitsune laughs, then stops short. The sound is the only one he's never been able to imitate. But Stiles's laugh has just emerged from his own throat: amused and playful and affectionate, and he isn't sure what to do with the sound.

Stiles is staring at him, and an echo of warmth to his warmth blossoms on his face. "You got me angry on purpose, going to dad. Asking him to call you _Stiles_, even though he knows –" Stiles cuts himself off, shaking his head. "You were drawing me out. Why?"

"I needed to be sure you were still here before jumping ship."

"You aren't leaving," Stiles scoffs. "I've been here all along, even when I was curled up in the fetal position and counting my fingers, and there's nothing you can say or do that'll fool me anymore. You love them. You love everyone I love. I made sure of it."

The nogitsune allows a moment for marvel. This boy, this boy. This boy, trembling with emotion, with love, eyes flashing. It will always know what love is, because of Stiles. "No one has ever loved me before," the nogitsune says. "No one has ever dared."

Stiles's chin jerks up, but then he ducks his head again before the nogitune can read his mobile features.

"It's how you've won," it sighs. "I'm not really taking them from you, Stiles. Do you understand? I'm trying to give them back."

Stiles collapses beside him onto the warm grass and turns to face the nogitsune, limbs more relaxed than the nogitsune ever remembers seeing them. "Are you?" he says.

"I don't want their pain anymore. I don't want yours."

"Cards on the table, then? Or pieces on the board, I guess?" A grin takes over Stiles's features, then flickers out. "_Everyone has it, but no one can lose it. What is it?_"

The nogitsune stares. "What?"

"_Everyone has it but no one can –_"

"Your shadow!" the nogitsune shouts. "Stop. Don't – don't be me, okay? Don't _do_ that."

"It's a real question," Stiles says. "_No one can lose it_. Right? I _can't_. Do you know what would happen if I lost my shadow?"

The nogitsune flips so that it's staring up into cloudless blue. It can't look at the face it's beginning to think of as its own right now. "What, you'd have to chase it out of Neverland and get Wendy to sew it back?" the nogitsune offers, and it realizes it's using Stiles's patented patter to talk to _Stiles_, which is recursive and weird.

"No," Stiles says, complete with eye-roll. "I'd lose myself. For good." His lips quirk. "If you left now, this," he says, gesturing to his own body, "would be empty. A toy with dead batteries. Maybe it'd keep breathing, maybe its heart'd keep beating. I don't know. But it wouldn't be me." He shrugs. "Wouldn't be us? Whatever. I wasn't lying."

The nogitsune shudders. It can feel its airway narrowing. Its breaths coming faster. "Your Shadow," the nogitsune says. (_Jung thought the Shadow represented any parts of oneself that were suppressed by the conscious mind._)

"Yeah," Stiles says.

"Like violence, and anger."

"And grief," Stiles says.

The nogitsune closes its eyes against the image of Claudia Stilinski, blade in hand. "You did this to me on purpose. Why did you do this?"

"There's a legend about how to defeat a shapeshifter," Stiles says, "written on a scroll. Deaton translated it to mean that the body must be changed in order to get the spirit to leave."

"I _know_ that," the nogitsune says. "I was you, remember?"

Stiles bulldozes over his snark, eyes wide, lips pinched. "If you tattooed or burned your body, everyone would know who you were, because that doesn't show up on most shapeshifters. You could say the same thing about a werewolf bite: only the werewolf in his own body can show you the glow in his eyes. But all those things only make any difference if there are _two_ of you. I felt totally swindled. After all that work to get the scroll and translate it, it was basically like, _mark one of you up, somehow, and you'll be able to tell the difference_.

"But then Derek took the scroll to an expert, who said that Deaton had misread one of the symbols. The spell of the nogitsune can be broken by changing the _person._ By changing…"

"…who they are?" the nogitsune says. "Their identity."

"Bingo," says Stiles. "There's more than one kanji for identity. This one was more like… personhood. Derek and the Pack dug us a home in the ground and that was that."

The nogitsune stares. "So – what? I'm changed. I'm defeated. Let me _go._"

Stiles shakes his head. "Don't you get it? I can't. I _need_ you. To be whole. To be _real._" He quirks a ghost of his usual, wry smile. "We've got to go home together."

Something is happening in the center of the nogitsune's ribcage. It feels like a spasm. Thoughts spiral outward like (_the Golden Mean: a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is φ, the golden ratio, growing wider (or further from its origin) by a factor of φ for every quarter turn it makes… the Axis Mundi – the center of the world, from which all holiness springs) _uncurling from his mind. He's tried so hard, fought so long. First, for Stiles's body, to carve himself a home in this boy's chest, so he can wreak the havoc for which he was summoned, for which he was _made. _Then, fighting against Stiles's own nature, once he was entrenched: the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. And finally, the battle to bring Stiles back to himself. And it's all nothing to him, now.

Because _he's_ no longer nothing. Not Void. He belongs to Stiles, now. He's _part of _Stiles. On the other side of dreaming, it's _his_ father who worries. His friends. His Pack.

He's hurt them. They're his, and he's hurt them.

He feels it coming, the panic, but it ebbs away under the force of a hand at the junction of neck and shoulder, and his lungs expand, and his marvelous heart beats, and his eyes see and he is so, so lucky that he landed here, in this time and this place with these people (_Scott. Derek. Lydia. Melissa. John._) who – who love him.

He feels himself – his sense of self – slip _sideways_. Because he is sure what he is feeling is that he loves them back.

He opens his eyes to see Stiles looking at him with the sort of caution that sits uneasily on his open features, to feel that it is Stiles's hands on him, grounding him.

"Are you sure?" he rasps.

Stiles grins. "_Let me in, Stiles_," he says.

"Oh my god, shut up," Stiles's shadow replies, and then they're awake.

* * *

A/N: Did anyone else wonder why they didn't bite Stiles before he split into two people? I did. The way Stiles and Derek interpreted the scroll at first is my explanation for why not.

There's an epilogue to come.

CC appreciated!


	5. V of V

Epilogue:

* * *

Stiles Stilinksi wakes up.

He can hear his father in the kitchen; it seems only moments have passed since he tucked the nogitsune in at the couch. His father is on the phone and speaking in his softest, angriest voice, words like _my son_ and _thought better of_ and _trust me to._ Five minutes later the McCalls are pulling into the drive and another minute later so is Derek Hale. They congregate outside and mutter to themselves at the door. Loudly. The Sheriff stands in the open doorway, which makes it even easier to hear the tone and snatches of dialog, but it's all the same: worry, fear for Stiles, for the Sheriff.

Scott hurries over to Stiles by sliding through the doorway under the Sheriff's arm. If looks could kill, Stiles is pretty sure his father would have vivisectioned Scott for trying to keep him out of the loop, but Stiles sees Mrs McCall step once more unto the breach and Scott rushes to Stiles. "Omigosh, Stiles, are you okay?" he says.

Stiles looks up at him, squints, like he can _see_ Scotty lie by peering closely enough. When that doesn't work, he examines Scott's wide, panicky eyes and pinched mouth. "Deaton's mountain ash barrier gave me a little jolt, but I'm all right," he says, ducking his head and looking up from under his lashes at Scott, who pales. "It's gonna be okay, now, Scotty. Promise," he says, and Scott huffs a little, shaky breath, like he isn't sure if he can trust Stiles, but can't quite help it. After a minute, he nods.

Derek walks straight into his space. Drops to his haunches, examines Stiles's eyes up close.

"Hi," Stiles says on the exhale, closes his eyes. "Hi, Sourwolf. I missed you, like, a lot."

"Hi, Stiles," Derek says.

"Are you sure?" he says, keeping his eyes closed, trusting Derek between him and the world. "I don't smell _off_ or something?"

Derek leans in and stiffs Stiles's neck ostentatiously. "You smell human," he confirms.

"Funny. I keep thinking I'm like a container of milk left sitting on the shelf too long. Looks alright and smells okay until you pour it out on your cereal and then it's got chunks and it smells like old gym socks."

There's a pause. "You smell like Stiles Stilinski," Derek confirms. "Boy and lacrosse gear and anxiety and Adderall."

"Oh my god, thanks so _much_," he says, blinking his eyes open, and it's only a quarter sarcasm: the confirmation is soothing. He skims his gaze up: at Derek, who has broken through personal barriers to feed him, keep him, read to him, keep others safe from him.

He reaches out his hand and Derek catches it in his, squeezes it. And then, as if Scott can't really help himself, he reaches out to clutch Stiles's other hand, and Stiles's father's hand covers it, and Melissa's bring all of theirs together, and they are in a huddled ball of fear, relief and joy, and Stiles just marinates in the _humanness_ of it, how _real_ he feels now, not like a computer with faulty programming.

Stiles tries to remember that it was the nogitsune, not him, who kept feeling like it wasn't really _real_, like it wasn't itself; like it _had no self_, like it was no one, no-thing…

_(Void_.)

Stiles can't help but think that the only reason he's won is that he convinced the nogitsune to sidle away from its own fears: the fear of open arms, the way they indebt and confine and claim. A fox is nothing if not a wild thing, and in the end maybe the nogitsune was as horror-struck as it was sorry.

"Stiles," his father says. "Stiles, what is it?"

For an eyeblink, Stiles considers telling them everything. That part of him feels he's _found_ these people, while the other insists he's reclaimed them. He pictures it, the way they would draw back from him if they knew what he really is. He isn't sure he could survive it.

"I'm just so glad to be _here_," he says, and buries his face in his father's shirt.

* * *

The memories fade.

They bleed together and expand and the edges wear away like smoke on the air. And sometimes Stiles actively buries them, throws sod on them and pisses on their graves in acts of defiant suppression.

Maybe it's because a trickster is a genius at the art of oblivion.

The memories fade.

They have to, if Stiles is going to survive them.

* * *

Stiles waits for Derek in his new apartment.

Part of the danger of being Stiles Stilinski (_full time_) is that he can and does look up just about anything, and he's easily bored. One, Adderall-fueled weekend on the 'net, a trip to the locksmith's and three days of practice later, and he can go wherever he pleases. He isn't so skilled that he's going to be embarking on a life of crime anytime soon, but it's the little things that come in handy.

(_Like that time you did research on shrapnel bombs? Not all knowledge is good, Stiles_.)

Stiles shivers. Derek keeps his apartment pretty cool, but he guesses that makes sense for werewolves, whose skin seems to run warm all the time (_the pads of Derek's fingers along the vulnerable skin of Stiles's neck_) and who have a penchant for leather. Maybe it's primal: wearing the flesh of a dead thing, wanting to show your mastery, your bravery, to anyone who looks and sees you beneath, wearing the skin of a conquered –

(._Stopstopstop._)

At first, Stiles thought Derek led the life of an ascetic, but renting the apartment is a step up from the railhouse, and now, it seems, there are a few books scattered here and there, an honest-to-God pillow on an honest-to-God sofa. If everything is in a many-shades-of-gray palette that make the apartment look like a spread of Emotionally Unavailable Bachelors Monthly, it's still – such a step up. (_And insert Shades of Gray joke, here._)

He comes across a book with a swath of tape along the spine and picks it up. Stiles flips the book open – poetry. "Figures Sourwolf would read poetry," he jokes (_to who, the voice in your head, Stiles? really,_) but he doesn't set it aside. Instead, he backs to Derek's couch and begins to read. As it does so often with Stiles, casual interest slips to obsession, slips to sprawling across any flat surface and absorbing the information as if it might be the key to future survival, which, hey, Beacon Hills, one never can tell, which slips into sleep and dreaming.

Derek comes home, plucks the offending text off of his slumbering chest, and he stirs.

"Hi, Sourwolf," he says, stretching his arms above his head. He still has moments like this, where his mind seems to float free, like a boat come unmoored from the dock. He can tell by the way he barely has any control of the words that come spilling out of his mouth.

Derek pauses for a moment, shoulders going taut, before relaxing and returning the book to its place on the shelf. "I haven't seen much of you lately," he says. "I said I would train you and I meant it. If you want. You're always welcome here."

"Nothing feels like home anymore," Stiles says, and he hadn't known that he felt that way until the words were tumbling from his mouth.

Derek returns to the couch to crouch in front of Stiles, looking up into his face. His gray-green-blue eyes catch the light no matter where he is, the bastard. He says nothing, though, and the silence works: Stiles keeps babbling.

"Sometimes Scott shoots me this _look_. Like he's afraid I'll tear him limb from limb, and leave the bloody, twitching pieces."

"He isn't afraid of that," Derek says, eyes going sad around the edges. "He's afraid of what your father and Lydia are afraid of. That you'll disappear on them again."

Stiles snorts. "Pshyeah."

"They don't know you the way I do," Derek says, quiet.

"Do you?" Stiles says, giving Derek a wary, cautious look out of the corner of his eye. Which is weird, because he could swear he trusts Derek now more than any other human being. Even Scott. Even his Dad, and he knows that's wrong but it's still true.

Derek lifts his hand in response, then stops the motion a foot from where Stiles wants it.

Stiles swallows and bares his neck, tilting his head to one side.

"See?" Derek says, pressing his hand to the juction between neck and shoulder. "We know one another."

Stiles throws his arms around Derek and clings, which is also weird because he's pretty sure they don't touch one another like this, but Derek clings just as fiercely, then swings him a bit side-to-side, like he's rocking Stiles, and Stiles huffs out something that sounds a little like a laugh and a little like a sob.

"I want it both ways," Derek says, pulling back. "I want you to be better, but… I want you to need me."

"They're not mutually exclusive," Stiles says, burrowing his face into Derek's neck again.

"They are when you don't remember needing me most of the time," Derek says. He closes his eyes and the fan of dark lashes out onto Derek Hale's cheek does something to Stiles's guts. He reaches a finger out to brush them against the other man's cheek, which turns into stroking the skin over Derek's cheekbone with the pad of his thumb. "Sometimes I wish I could forget, too. I think I envy you."

"I remember – things. Bits and pieces," Stiles says, and suddenly he wants to _kiss_ Derek Hale, which is new. Sure, Derek's always been wildly attractive – and Stiles means that in both senses of the phrase – but it's always been in the abstract, before this moment. Suddenly, Derek seems his to touch, to kiss. Seems close enough that, were Stiles to try to bridge the gap, Derek would meet him halfway.

But he has to stop thinking that, because _it's not true._ Derek might belong to Stiles, but not to him. Never to him.

Insane troll logic, but it causes Stiles to take a sliding step back from Derek and clear his throat. "I mean, um, I thought that maybe we could read some. I was having an awesome nap, you know?" His voice lowers. "And I like the sound of your voice."

"Yeah," Derek says, and he retrieves the book from the shelf, settles on the couch.

Stiles flips onto his back and wriggles until his head is in Derek Hale's lap, which he would _never_ do in real life. That, and the mention of poetry makes Stiles decide that he must still be asleep.

He must still be dreaming.

Derek's hand settles in Stiles's hair, which he still hasn't bothered to cut, big hand weaving through the strands and giving a gentle tug.

Stiles feels like purring.

And in the dream, Derek begins to read:

_In a dark time, the eye begins to see, _

_I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; _

_I hear my echo in the echoing wood— _

_A lord of nature weeping to a tree. _

_I live between the heron and the wren, _

_Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. _

_What's madness but nobility of soul _

_At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! _

_I know the purity of pure despair, _

_My shadow pinned against a sweating wall. _

_That place among the rocks—is it a cave, _

_Or winding path? The edge is what I have. _

_A steady storm of correspondences! _

_A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon, _

_And in broad day the midnight come again! _

_A man goes far to find out what he is— _

_Death of the self in a long, tearless night, _

_All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. _

_Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire. _

_My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly, _

_Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is __I?_

_A fallen man, I climb out of my fear. _

_The mind enters itself, and God the mind, _

_And one is One, free in the tearing wind._

* * *

_A/N:_

Thanks so much for reading this one! It curled up in my brain and wouldn't leave. :)

Most of Stiles's (and later, the nogitsune's) parenthesized thoughts are direct quotes from Wikipedia... although I stole from several other articles as well, especially when it came to Jung and Shadows. All of the poems come from a collection called 'The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart', and it really is an awesome compilation. Buy it now, but not from Amazon, as they are a bunch of bad, bad people.

I'm primed to release a lot of other fic - I had an explosion of creativity after the Nogitsune storyline. Well - minus the 'cool' Japanese elements (sorry) and more along the lines of identity and what on EARTH they're going to do with Stiles's character next. I've never had any issues with being Jossed, so I will probably keep on with stories even if/after they've been made invalid by new plot.

Now you lurkers, it's time to weigh in! Even if your comment is "it was good" or "I read five chapters but despised every moment" please take the time to leave a review, although ones with details about what worked for you will win many internets and be petted and adored.

-K


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